It’s time for Batavia to take another look at its crumbling dam near the heart of its downtown, the city administrator said this week.
Bill McGrath urged the city council Tuesday night to consider forming a citizen commission that will revisit whether the city should remove the north dam on the Fox River.
“The dam is falling apart,” McGrath said as he displayed pictures of the dam’s crumbling concrete.
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What to do with Batavia’s dam was the center of a contentious debate in the city in 2003, when residents voted by a 2 to 1 margin on an advisory referendum to keep the north dam.
McGrath said there were many reasons voiced by residents who opposed removal, but it seemed that for many, they opposed taking the dam out because it “wouldn’t be Batavia without the dam.”
In the years since, environmental groups have studied water quality and said that the areas above the dam are some of the worst, McGrath said. The state’s Department of Natural Resources supports dam removal but will not come in and take down a dam if there is opposition by the city, he said. But he has been told that they are not interested in providing funds to repair the dam that is currently in place, McGrath said.
The idea of forming a citizen commission and considering another advisory referendum will come before the council again for a vote, but aldermen on Tuesday seemed receptive to the idea. A citizen commission could research and educate the community about the dam’s history and purpose, said Ald. Susan Stark.
“I don’t even know why it is still there,” she said.
Mayor Jeffery Schielke said that the council must also consider what dam removal would mean to the nearby Depot Pond and the developments built along it.
McGrath told aldermen in a memo that there is also interest by Batavia’s neighbors to work on river initiatives on a regional level.
The communities could ” … approach the river as a regional gem, and work together so the attractiveness of our area as a whole is enhanced. We get so used to having the river that we sometimes don’t realize how lucky we are, even with the traffic holdups,” he wrote in the memo.