Jay Young

A year after buying the shuttered Roger Smith Hotel in New York City, Florida-based Timeshares Only sold the property at a loss.

An Upper East Side townhouse sold to an unknown buyer for $38 million. Designer Luca Orlandi previously owned 18 East 73rd Street.

We may only be two months into 2024, but the New Year is already shaping up to be an interesting one when it comes to how we pay for local lake and watershed programs. There is always some level of uncertainty built into this type of work, on both the environmental and the human side of the ledger. Just as we don’t always know what weather, plant, and algae conditions will be like at any given time, it is also difficult to perfectly predict what funds will be available from the many different contributors focused on Chautauqua Lake. While we will have to wait a bit longer to get a better picture of the environmental conditions, we do have some answers on the project funding side of things thanks to recent developments.

Pictured above is a screenshot of the United States Geological Survey’s National Water Dashboard, one of many national environmental databases. Chautauqua Institution and The Jefferson Project are currently developing their own Chautauqua Lake dashboard to display research data.

CHAUTAUQUA–There has been a lot of Chautauqua Lake activity in the past few weeks leading up to the July 4 holiday.

Emerging invasive species continue to be a main target of alliance member-led programs on the lake, particularly now during the summer growing season.

Streams and lakes exist on different scales of time than we do. They were here long before us, and they will be here long after us. Five or ten years may seem like a very long time when we think about many things in our day-to-day lives, but that's nothing compared to the lifetime of a stream. When we look at the scale of human projects aimed at improving the watershed, a decade of time can be a good place to start.

While Labor Day traditionally signals the winding down of our yearly lake management season, Alliance members are still hard at work caring for the lake and looking ahead to 2025.

Work targeting invasive species on Chautauqua Lake takes on several different forms over the course of the year. Some non-native plants are well-established and require long term management, others grow in select areas and can be targeted on a smaller scale. Last but not least, there are invasive species that are not currently growing in the lake (as best we can tell), and many people are hard at work trying to keep it that way.

After years and years of hard work, Chautauqua Lake has an official new partner – the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.