Town officials this week approved an approximately $195,000 contract to dredge a pond at the New Canaan Nature Center.
A build-up of material can be seen beneath the surface of the “Kiwanis Pond” at the town-owned Oenoke Ridge property, located down a short path from the Visitors Center, so it’s time for a dredge, according to Tiger Mann, director of the Department of Public Works.
“That starts to affect the flora and fauna that are around it,” Mann told members of the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting, held Tuesday at Town Hall and via videoconference. “This has been on our radar for quite some time, and we’ve been pushing it a little bit. Now it’s to the point where we need to bring it forward.”
First Selectman Dionn Carlson and Selectman Steve Karl voted 2-0 in favor of a $195,456 contract with New Canaan-based Peter Lanni Inc. to do the work. Selectman Amy Murphy Carroll was absent.
The selectmen asked about the history of the pond (dates to the 1950s, created with help from the Kiwanis Club of New Canaan), how deep it is (eight to 10 feet), how Mann knows it needs dredging (you can see the material) and what will be done with the dredged matter (it will go to a one-acre area adjacent to the Nature Center’s butterfly meadow, then replanted a wetlands mix in hopes of increasing the meadow and thereby expanding the pollinator pathway).
Karl asked whether the town has considered installing a catch area or “sedimentation forebay” for sediment to protect the pond.
Mann said not yet.
“There is another pond up above that actually is the sink,” Mann said. “This is just more just a detritus and leaf flow versus the other one, which is the sink for coming in from the neighboring properties up off of say Parade Hill. When we get to that point, there might be the thought of doing something with a sediment forebay there.”
Mann said the original budget for the project was $250,000 and that the town has already received an Inland Wetlands permit for the dredge.
“And then we actually had to get a separate special permit from P&Z [the Planning & Zoning Commission] because we had an excess amount of material being moved on site,” he said. “We’re taking the material from the pond itself, out and putting it in another area on the property, as well as there’s an adjacent area to the wetland itself that is full of phragmites. We’re going to pull those phragmites out, dispose of those. But the area that we now have excavated out, we need to put some of the material from the pond back in that. So because of that, we needed a P&z permit.”
The town received that permit from P&Z on April 29, he said.