City of Hastings hosts public meeting on Lake Hastings water quality management plan

HASTINGS, Neb. — Lake Hastings is going on 18 years being classified as an impaired lake. 

High school students in Hastings only know the lake as having poor water quality. The city wants to change that. It’s starting a water quality management plan. That plan went into action Thursday night.

“We’ve got a lake almost half-full of sediment and it’s a long road to restoration," Civil Water Resources Engineer Tara Ogren said. "We’ve started that long process here at the city.”

The city hosted a public meeting including natural resource district officials and the Nebraska Game and Parks. Much of the conversation concerned the possibility of dredging the lake. Civil Water Resources Engineer Tara Ogren says that could be five to 10 years down the line. It could be a mechanical dredge that requires the lake to be drained, or it could be a hydraulic dredge.

The first step is the year-long process of developing the water quality management plan, which makes the city more likely to win grants.

“We’re working with modeling programs to estimate the sediment, nitrogen and phosphorous, that’s coming into the lake, and we’re taking water quality samples, we have stream gauges set up,” Ogren said.

Beyond the scientific data, the city wants to learn what locals want from the lake. 

“I think that the community is willing to get together and see what kind of measures can be taken, what kind of education can be discussed to improve the water quality,” Ogren said.

The city is recruiting people to join a citizen engagement group that will meet a couple times a year to discuss the lake. It’s also forming a citizen science group.