Lakesmart

 This past summer a small team of seven volunteers (under the leadership of Sylvia Wilson) received training from Maine Lakes as part of the statewide LakeSmart Program. LakeSmart is a first-in-the-nation lake resilience program, driven by dedicated community-based volunteers who educate lakeshore homeowners about protecting the water quality of their lake. Volunteers are trained by Maine Lakes to evaluate properties from the top of the driveway to the shoreline using LakeSmart climate-ready standards for water quality protection. They also recommend lake-friendly practices to homeowners to manage runoff and erosion. The LakeSmart Award sign recognizes homeowners of properties that are most protective of their lake. Our small group of volunteers learned how to evaluate individual properties by spending a morning evaluating one of our own properties within the HWPA. We also cooperated with the Thompson Lake Environmental Association to learn more about how they have successfully embraced this program. We hope that in the future, HWPA can cooperate fully in the program with several trained volunteer evaluators to add to the 274 site evaluations that were completed and 85 awards given statewide in 2023.