Crystal Lake neighbors at odds with park district over creek filled with stinky slime: ‘Nothing but muck’

Crystal Lake resident Sheree Lavelle brought a mason jar filled with what looked like to be black tar to a recent Crystal Lake Park District meeting. She passed it around to park board members, explaining that this muck is what makes up the majority of the creek that flows through her backyard into Crystal Lake.

The substance is thick and smells. For over a year, she and almost a dozen neighbors whose backyards abut the channel, which flows from Lippold Park to the city’s namesake lake, have been gathering to figure out what they can do to clean up the muck. She calls them the “Channel Landowners Coalition.”

“It just sits in this big slough,” Lavelle said. “It’s just muck. It’s nothing but muck.”

Water flows from the Lippold Wetland Complex through a storm sewer that takes the water to the channel and into the northwest corner of Crystal Lake, according to park district documents. This year, Lavelle noticed water lilies and reeds popping up through the mud and the smell getting worse.

“The muck hasn’t gone anywhere,” she said. “It stinks so bad this year.”

About 20 years ago, the park district paid to remove silt coming into the same channel and installed a filter to prevent more from coming in, according to archived Chicago Tribune articles on Newspapers.com. Lavelle and her neighbors are hoping the park district can help again, but officials have said it isn’t the park district’s responsibility.

Years before, the channel used to have a sandy bottom with about 5 to 6 feet of water, Lavelle said. She said the only option is to dredge out the silt that has been coming in for the past 20 years in order for water to start moving freely again.

“Now there’s 6 inches of water and 5 feet of muck,” she said. “There’s no other way. It’s a no-brainer.”

Dredging the channel could cost more than $60,000, based on an estimate Lavelle got last year.

But water coming into the channel is clear, and filters are working properly, according to the civil engineering firm Hey and Associates, which developed a “state of the lake” report in 2022. Since water from the park district-owned Lippold Park is clear of silt, officials do not need to dredge the channel, Crystal Lake Park District Executive Director Jason Herbster said.

“Based on this research, the park district doesn’t feel they are responsible for the silting of the channel and that it’s [the residents’] property and for them to move forward on taking care of it,” he said.

Plants and leaves that fall and decompose in the water could be contributors to increased muck rather than water coming from Lippold Park, Herbster said.

“Last fall, when I went out there to look at it when the water’s level [was] low, there were a lot of leaves in the channel,” he said. “Does that contribute to this situation? As they break down, what does that turn into?”

The park district analyzes the lake every year to make sure it stays healthy. So far, the muck in the channel has not shown any evidence that it is affecting the lake, Herbster said.

“The park district doesn’t typically go on private property and do work,” he said. “If a tree of ours falls on a neighbor’s property, we take care of the part on our property, and the neighbor has to take care of the part on their property. It’s like what any other property owner would do.”