Protecting Candlewood from invasive species
The drawdown at Candlewood Lake is almost done.
But the answer to the question on everyone’s mind — did it stop the lake’s nascent zebra mussel population in its tracks? — is still up on the air.
Divers, docks and mussel motels may answer it by fall. Now, it’s wait-and-see.
“It’s too early to tell,’’ said Neil Stalter, the Candlewood Lake authority’s director of ecology and environmental education.
Here’s what is known. Last year, people found 39 zebra mussels — small, striped, seemingly innocuous — along the lake’s shoreline.
Stalter said he’s confident that the winter’s deep drawdown — which lowered the lake’s level by 11 feet — exposed any other shoreline zebra mussels to air, killing off the non-native, profoundly invasive mollusks.
What no one knows is whether other mussels anchored themselves on rocks in deeper water, readying to infest the lake, with its thousands of offspring producing thousands more.
If that’s the case, look south to Lake Lillinonah.
In 2010, divers found exactly one zebra mussel in the lake. The ones the divers didn’t find did the damage.
“Within three years, they were everywhere,’’ said Greg Bollard, a member of Save the Lake, the nonprofit organization supporting environmental efforts at Lillinonah.
Shannon Young, chairman of the Lake Lillinonah Authority, said that now, the
weight of zebra mussel encrustations make some docks too heavy to haul out of Lillinonah’s water to repair.
Bollard said some lake residents have now built lifts to raise their boats’ hulls out of the water, lest mussels begin to glom onto them after a few days sitting dockside.
Young said to avoid contaminating any other lake with the mussel-contaminated bilge, he sticks to boating on Lillinonah.
“I never use any other water body, period,’’ he said.
When zebra mussels multiply in sufficient numbers, they feed voraciously on plankton and algae. Filtering out all that organic matter leaves the water very clear.
That’s not a good thing. Bollard said the clear water lets sunlight penetrate deeper into a lake. That means invasive aquatic weeds like Eurasian watermilfoil get extra sunlight and grow tall and thick — something that’s happening now at Lillinonah.
Watermilfoil is the other invasive species the drawdown at Candlewood Lake could knock back. The retreating
water leaves the weeds exposed to winter’s frigid air, killing them.
But February’s heavy snows may have stymied that effort this year. The snow provides the watermilfoil with a nice insulating blanket, letting it survive until spring.
The snow also ended any attempt by volunteers to walk the lake’s 60 miles of shoreline, looking for zebra mussels on shoreline rocks and crevices.
“Clearly, the snow put the kibosh on that,’’ said Steve Kluge of New Milford, and a member of the Candlewood Lake Authority.
Now, Candlewood on the rise.
First Light Power Resources maintains the lake’s level via the Rocky River power plant in New Milford — it lets the lake’s waters flow down through the plant’s turbines in the fall to lower the lake, then pumps water from the river back up into the lake in the spring.
First Light spokesperson Len Greene said this year, the company dropped the lakes level from its working
level of 429.5 feet above sea level to 418.5 feet. But it now has to return the lake to the working level by mid-April for the start of the fishing season.
“In the next month and a half, we’ll be pumping up quite a lot,’’ Greene said.
Full or drained, there is still hope Candlewood will be spared a zebra musselinfested future.
Because people found Candlewood’s 39 zebra mussels scattered in different spots along its shoreline, there’s the thought that the mussels aren’t concentrated in a clustered colony.
“There’s no pattern to it,’’ Kluge said.
Stalter said 2020 water quality samples showed no evidence of zebra mussel veligers — the microscopic larval stage of the mollusks
— swimming in the lake’s waters.
But there is this. Zebra mussels — natives to the Caspian and Black Seas — showed up the Great Lakes in 1988. In 32 years, they invaded waters as far south as Louisiana. They’re in all the Great Lakes, in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River.
And the Housatonic. Kluge said the zebra mussel threat shows the need for more scientific study — especially on how Candlewood’s waters move.
“It really highlights the need for further exploration of how Candlewood Lake works,’’ he said.
Despite closing 2020 with their third-best profits ever, Connecticut banks entered this year having yet to bring back the jobs they shed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Statewide payrolls are at their lowest since the aftermath of the Great Recession.
The jobs scenario reflects two trends in Connecticut and the New York City region — uncertainty over the economic outlook and a discovery that banks in some instances are able to fulfill customer expectations adequately with fewer employees.
Banks have braced for the uncertainty of whether residential and commercial borrowers will be able to keep up with their loan commitments, particularly in niche industries like hospitality or in locales where unemployment levels remained elevated for any extended stretch.
But whereas Connecticut banks cut jobs last year, banks in some parts of the United States were staffing up — only slightly in the aggregate, according to data supplied the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. In Northeast banks, only New Jersey and Maine saw staff levels increase last year, with New York absorbing only a slight decrease.
As of December, Connecticut banks listed 86 cents of every $100 in loans outstanding as being in arrears on payments due, equating to about $772 million
on a total loan portfolio totaling a record $89.8 billion. Loan portfolios are in far better shape than at the worst point of the Great Recession, when problem loans accounted for about $3 of every $100 on the books. But banks are nevertheless socking away reserves against the possibility some borrowers will go bankrupt.
“We’ve been very patient
with our hotel [borrowers] — and with good reason,” said Jack Barnes, CEO of People’s United Financial, during an interview after the company announced a $7.6 billion agreement to merge into M&T Bank. “I believe we’ll get there and help them get to the other side of this. Our regulators have also been very supportive of banks’ flexibility and patience on that . ...
Everyone’s trying to do the right thing.”
Prepared to expand
After hospitals emergency wards, bank staffs may have absorbed the next largest crush of pandemic mayhem last spring after the U.S. Department of the Treasury pushed the Payroll Protection Program out the door.
Banks had only hours’
notice to learn the intricacies, finalize systems, and train staff to handle the flood of PPP applications, with the funds supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. While more than 67,000 businesses in Connecticut were able to land financing, many complained in the early going about responses by banks to which they were applying, even as banks reassigned staff to handle demand.
On the eve of a new round of PPP initiated last month, Connecticut banks were continuing to make do with staffing levels well below a year ago. In the aggregate, banks reported carrying 13,700 jobs calculated on a full-time equivalent basis as of the end of December, according data revealed this week by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That was about 640 fewer than 12 months earlier, a 4.4 percent decline.
Banks held the line on payroll despite profits eclipsing the $1 billion mark for a third consecutive year. While that was down 22 percent from record earnings in 2019, profits were nevertheless five times what they booked in 2009, when the industry had about 200 more workers on their collective payrolls.
“Even in a pandemic year, you look at commercial loan growth and it’s approaching 8 percent to 10 percent,” said John Ciulla, CEO of Waterbury-based Webster Financial and its Webster Bank subsidiary. “We’re not about generating shareholder value through cost cutting . ... Our goal, obviously, is if we do get a lift in rates and loan growth comes back significantly, we want to be prepared to be able to expand commercial banking, hire new commercial bankers, continue to invest in technology.