Lake for Enid area is back in consideration

By Robert Barron, Staff Writer

August 06, 2008 12:32 am

— The possibility of a lake being built near Enid is back in consideration after presentations during Tuesday night’s Enid City Commission study session.
Carolyn Nicholas, an environmental engineer with Envirotech Engineering Co., renewed her proposal for a 700-plus acre lake near Enid. Nicholas, a former president of Enid Park Board, has been campaigning for a recreational lake for two years.
Nicholas said there are many people in Enid who travel an hour or more to a lake every weekend. She told commissioners a lake near Enid would be a tremendous quality-of-life issue and could contribute to future water supplies.
Nicholas’ studies show the right type of land must be available, and she said a minimum of 700 acres is needed for a lake, but it probably would take 1,000 acres to do it right. The land also must have the right type of topography, soil classification and water sources.
Nicholas identified several sites in the Enid area, including 15th and East Garriott along Boggy Creek, southeast Gar-field County along Skeleton Creek and the convergence of Black Bear and Crow creeks northeast of Covington.
However, there are a number of problems involved in creating a lake, she said. The last lake built in Oklahoma was Lake Arcadia near Edmond, which was built in the early 1980s at a cost of $50 million. Sources of funding are the Army Corps of Engineers and Oklahoma Water Resources Board. However, neither group could supply more than half the amount of funding necessary to build a lake.
If the Corps of Engineers does not participate in the project, Nicholas said, the city would have control over the shoreline and could develop the land and recoup some of the costs. The Corps of Engineers would control that land if the lake was a Corps project. Also, she said, the Corps does primarily flood control lake construction, as opposed to recreational lake work.
Nicholas said she thought the best place originally was the convergence of Black Bear and Crow creeks, but she said there are a number of National Conservation Resource Service flood control dams in the area.
Karl Stickley, of C.H. Gurnesey & Co., an engineering firm consulting with the city on a long-range water plan, said during the meeting there is a possibility of a lake being built west of Hennessey. Such a lake could tie into Enid’s water system and also be a flood-control source for Kingfisher, Ward 5 Commissioner Daron Rudy said.