Lake water improvement may not affect housing

MOSES LAKE — Owners of homes along the shore of Moses Lake may see an improvement in the view from their docks after treatment the water received last summer. 

“Last summer, the lake saw a major breakthrough in water quality and for the first time in recent memory: the Rocky Ford Arm made it through the entire recreational season without a single harmful algae bloom advisory,” representatives of the water treatment company SePRO wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald. 

The improvement was as a result of a treatment SePRO did to reduce the phosphorus in the water that feeds blue-green algae, said Ryan Van Goethem, a limnologist with SePR and the lead for the Moses Lake project. The treatment reduced the growth of algae in the project area within a couple of weeks by about 30%, he said. 

“The goal of this project is to reduce how much phosphorus is in the lake,” Van Goethem said. “We did a treatment to the lake sediments in the upper part of the lake called Rocky Ford Arm. We treated about 2000 acres of the sediment to prevent phosphorus release from the sediment in the lake during the summer.” 

Anybody who’s lived in Moses Lake for any amount of time has discovered that our lake is a little different from mountain lakes like Chelan or Coeur d’Alene. Our lake is susceptible to blue-green algae, which both discolors the lake and can cause health problems for people and animals. That can affect the waterfront homes with yards sloping down into the lake. 

“I would have to think that if we had Lake Chelan water quality, we'd have much higher waterfront pricing,” said Moses Lake real estate agent Alan Heroux. “Moses Lake is what it is; it's never been a clear body of water.” 

Nonetheless, waterfront property is some of the most desirable, and thus highest-priced, land on the market, he said. 

“Average pricing for waterfronts is in the $800,000 range for active listings right now,” he said. “So waterfront is by far most expensive property.” 

Moses Lake, being part pf the Columbia Basin Project, is diluted somewhat by irrigation water coming in from Crab Creek to the east, Van Goethem said. The northwestern part of the lake is fed by Rocky Ford Creek and while there’s some mixing with the irrigation water, it tends not to be flushed out as thoroughly. 

“What we found was, with the water that came into the lake last year, if we weren't doing this project and there was no treatment, the algae levels would have been twice as high,” Van Goethem said. 

While the improvement in quality may make the water safer, Heroux said the draw of Moses Lake isn’t based on its natural beauty so much as that it’s a part of the community.  

“Moses Lake is what it is,” he said. “If you can clean it up, that'd be cool, but we're not going to change what we locals do with the lake. We're still going to recreate. We're still going to play on it. We still love to live on it.” 

That means lots on the lake aren’t going to be driven up by people moving to the area specifically for the lake and pricing out local residents, he added. 

“A local market has to depend on the local people to be able to afford homes in that market,” Heroux said. “It's when forces from outside come in and artificially drive up the market that things get crazy.”