The road back to a normal water system for all in Cedar Lake will be long and costly, but town officials are in it for the long haul to make it right.
The Town Council, with the help of Burke Engineering Project Manager Kevin Baldwin, presented the town’s newly enacted water master plan at Town Hall Tuesday evening. Town Manager Ben Eldridge said the town gave the plan to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management July 31, and the agency has since accepted it.
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“When I started here five months ago, the system in my opinion could be described as ‘in disarray’ — long-term boil advisories, irrigation bans, and a building moratorium,” Eldridge said. “And here we are five months later: Today, the advisory has been lifted, we are allowing irrigation, we’re in the good graces of IDEM. We’re talking with developers, and while I’d like to take credit for that, the town employs very capable, intelligent, hard-working staff who care about the town and have only what’s best for you in mind.”
IDEM sent a letter confirming town Water Works officials met with IDEM and Burke on August 4 to discuss the plan and determined that “a sufficient plan is in place to address capacity concerns.” The town can now submit notice of intent applications, Eldridge read from the letter, and the town having a drought plan for irrigation is a “great step in helping the town maintain capacity maintain the capacity and alleviate spikes in usage.”
The acknowledgement is positive, Eldridge said, but the town has a long way to go before it expands any further.
“It does not mean that the floodgates are open for development, but we are slowly getting back on our feet, getting to where we want to be,” Eldridge said.
IDEM inspected Cedar Lake water systems in October 2023 and August 2024, and between the two reports, the town’s water system seemingly worsened with a number of deficiencies increasing four times over, from three deficiencies to 14 deficiencies, the Post-Tribune previously reported.
Cedar Lake has three separate water systems: the West System, which has 3,100 service connections; the East System with 350 service connections; and Paradise Cove, which serves the municipal complex with four connections, said Kevin Baldwin, project manager for Burke who helped craft the plan. The three store a total of 560,000 gallons; the West, however, uses on average 584,000 gallons per day, while the East uses 86,400 gallons and Paradise Cove 28,000. Those numbers essentially double during the summer, he said.
The systems aren’t connected, but they serve 35% of the town’s population, while many homes are still on private wells from when the town was unincorporated, the Post-Tribune previously reported.
The first round of solutions that can happen relatively quickly is updating its supervisory control and data acquisition system, which would allow water operators to remotely monitor flows, pressures, tower levels, and pump status at each of the locations that they are installed in — therefore being able to react to events more quickly, Baldwin said. The town will also need to up its well production and storage for the West system since it’s deficient by 1 million gallons, and there should always be two times the average use available.
Larger water mains will be needed for both sides so one can pick up the slack if the other has issues, Baldwin said, and the town will need to implement asset maintenance and leak detection programs.
Long-term, Burke recommends that the town merge Paradise Cove with the East system, expanding East to encompass the Kristal Oaks tower on the northeast side and incorporating a proactive water main replacement program before roads get fixed, he said. Additionally, new tanks can be added to the West, but there would have to be “geological testing and fracture testing analysis to check the viability of the water that’s underground” to make sure that they are able to produce the gallonage or the volume that is necessary.
“We want to make sure that the actual quality of the water that’s coming out of the ground is sufficient for IDEM purposes, and so the next thing is really coordination with IDEM on all these pieces,” Baldwin said. “Then we’d like to acquire cost estimates and proposals from tank manufacturers and well drillers to get price tags to make sure that they are in line with an overall plan and then also coordination with developers on these particular discussions.”
The cost, Baldwin said, would hit somewhere in the $20 million to $30 million range, but that would hit over a period of 20 to 30 years, which gives the council time to work out how to pay for everything with as low of a taxpayer burden as possible. Also, private wells won’t be forced to go on the public wells, he added.
Carol Kerr, who moved to Cedar Lake from Highland seven years ago, said she’s concerned with the town’s lack of fire hyrdrants for the whole area.
“I’m like a city person, so I was kind of shocked when I moved here,” she said. “If there were a fire, God forbid, right now say, like, in Monastery Woods, would there be enough pressure in that fire hydrant to put the fire out? I mean, I asked somebody else in the fire department, and they said it depended on the time of day.
“I think when you buy an expensive home or even if you don’t have an expensive home and you put your life savings into that home, you assume when you come to the area you’re moving to that you have water and that you have good sewers.”
“I think what I’m trying to get at is the town is the town is growing and so going from what has happened in the last 15, 20 years in town because of the developments because of the master plan that is the overall goal and like what one of the statements was on the on the slide is to increase everyone’s available fire flow everywhere in town,” Baldwin said. “I might be saying this wrong, but I think one of the previous methods from the fire department was to use dry hydrants or use the lake for their fire protection means at some point in life. So, it depends where you’re at. It depends what time of the day is.
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” Kerr said.
Residents interested in looking at the Cedar Lake Water Master Plan slides presented at the meeting can find them at https://cedarlakein.gov/water-master-plan-special-meeting.
Alexandra Kukulka contributed.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
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