News & Reports

The Annual Membership Meeting of the Turtle Flambeau Flowage & Trude Lake Property Owners’ Association Inc. will take place on Saturday June 22, 2019, at 10:00 a.m., at the Great Northern Hotel (5070 Highway 51) in Mercer, WI.  (Enter through hotel lobby and proceed to the Great Room for the meeting)

AGENDA

1. Preliminaries
   • Call to order, introduction of Board members, agenda
   • Self-introduction of members, Determination of Quorum
   • Minutes of the Annual Membership Meeting of June 23, 2018, motion to approve
   • Treasurer’s Report, motion to approve
2. Elections
   Shown below are positions/offices where an election will take place at the Annual meeting. (B) indicates a nominee presented by the Board, (I) indicates an Incumbent in that position. Nominations for all positions/offices will also be taken from the Floor during the meeting.
   • Secretary      –  Open
   • Treasurer     –  Tom Mowbray (B) (I)
   • Director # 1  –  Mike Hittle  (B)
   • Director # 5 –  Ed Hrycuik (B) (I)
3. Presentation
   • Jeff Wilson – presentation “Osprey’s on the TFF/Trude”
4. Updates on Current and New Activities
   • President’s Report – Randy Schubert
   • Water Level – Jim Moore
   • Fish Management – Jim Kohl
   • Water Quality – Mike/Beth Myers
   • Invasive Species – Randy Payne
   • Education/Communication – Terry / Mike / Chad / Jean / Susan P.
     • Newsletter
     • Web page
     • Facebook page
5. Open Floor for Discussion
6. Final Comments and Adjournment

We will be holding our annual membership meeting on June 22, 2019 at 10:00 AM at the Great Northern Motel, 5070 US-51, Mercer, WI. Hopefully many of our membership will be able to attend. Please enter through the motel, (not restaurant) entrance. Also, The Wolf’s Den at the Great Northern offers a varied lunch menu that will be available after our meeting. An agenda will be posted as soon as it is available.

The Property Owners’ Association is seeking volunteers to serve on the board. Please contact President Randy Schubert, randysflowageview@gmail.com or Vice President Jeff Malison,
jmalison@wisc.edu, if you are interested in serving.

Positions that will be open are:

Director – Jim Moore
Director – Ed Hryciuk
Secretary – Bill Stewart
Treasurer – Tom Mowbray.

Both Ed Hryciuk and Tom Mowbray have agreed to run for another term.

The Northwoods Land Trust is a volunteer and member supported non-profit organization that conserves land through holding conservation easements, owning and managing donated land, acquiring land or easements, or any combination of these. The Trust functions in Vilas, Oneida, Forest, Florence, Iron, Price and northern Langlade counties.

Thanks to a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ Lake Protection program project, owners of large stretches of natural shorelines on lakes and flowages in Iron County are now being encouraged to consider lasting, voluntary protection of their lake properties. According to Northwoods Land Trust (NWLT) executive director Bryan Pierce, the lake project is based on highly-successful private lake shoreland protection projects conducted over the last ten years by NWLT in Vilas, Oneida, Forest, Florence and Price Counties.

“The DNR’s Wisconsin Lakes publication indicates that there are a total of 494 lakes in Iron County,” said Pierce. “These include 217 named and 277 unnamed lakes. The grant project is utilizing NWLT’s geographic information system (GIS) computer technology to identify all remaining privately-owned lake parcels with a minimum of about 500 feet of natural shoreline frontage.” Pierce explained that the project uses tax parcel maps and other data developed through the Iron County GIS Office. Digital parcel maps and aerial orthophotos are overlaid where needed to determine the extent of natural versus developed frontage.

“The selected lake parcels have now been mapped on the GIS system for each town,” said Pierce. “Within those maps we have identified a total of 572 lake and flowage parcels with 500 feet or more of natural shoreline remaining on privately-owned land. These parcels are owned by 274 private landowners. The parcels are then linked with the Iron County tax roll database to generate a mailing list of these landowners,” Pierce stated. “Copies of NWLT’s Landowner’s Conservation Guide will be mailed this spring to each of these identified lake property owners. As with our previous projects, volunteers are assisting us with assembling all of the landowner packets to prepare them for bulk mailing.”

Pierce noted that the lake protection project runs through the end of 2020. NWLT provides on-site technical assistance to any of those lake property owners who wish to permanently protect their land along these natural shorelines.

“We have already been successful in completing six conservation easement donations with interested property owners in Iron County. Those projects have included permanent protection of over 27,000 feet (5 miles) of natural lake, river and stream shorelines and 680 acres of shoreland, woodland and wetland habitats. These successful projects have already leveraged well over $1 million of charitable contribution values through those conservation easement donations. With a conservation easement, the natural shorelines are protected in perpetuity, but the land remains privately owned and managed and it is still subject to property taxes,” said Pierce. “The lands can be sold or passed on to heirs, but whoever owns the land in the future must retain its conservation values. Any access to the property for outdoor recreation is still up to the consent of the individual property owners.”

The Northwoods Land Trust also purchased the 38-acre Interstate Falls property just west of the intersection of U.S. Highways 2 and 51. That scenic property was then gifted to the Town of Kimball to remain a valuable scenic tourism attraction and conservation area in perpetuity.

The Northwoods Land Trust is a volunteer and member-supported nonprofit conservation organization. For more information on the Iron County lakes project, contact the NWLT office at (715) 479-2490.

Since the TFSWA docks are now taken out of the water entirely in the fall to prevent winter ice damage, we will have to wait until the road limits come off and the Northern Highland American Legion State Forest dock crew can get their equipment up here before the docks can go in this spring. That means it’s unlikely the docks will be put in before the fishing opener May 4th.

The Dike 10 project will finish up this spring. After the road limits come off Ross Construction will do the finally grading on the dike/road, then Pitlik and Wick will do the paving. We expect Sportsman’s and Robinson’s Landings to be fully open to the public during final construction.