While anglers and boaters are enjoying spring on the Madison lakes, thawed finally after an endless winter, experts warn that the clear water of the early season may be a short-lived pleasure.

Limnologists say that heavy rains last August and the harsh winter may combine to produce a bumper crop of the pesky algae blooms that clog up the lake during summer months and lead to everything from revolting odors to beach closings.

But that news is balanced this spring by two ambitious efforts to come up with new ways to face the difficult challenge of keeping urban lakes clean and healthy. One is called Yahara CLEAN (Capitol Lakes Environmental Assessment and Needs) and is based on a two-year agreement signed earlier this year between state and local governments. The project is aimed at reducing the runoff pollutants that are choking the Madison lakes with silt, weeds and algae and cleaning up the city's beaches. Funded by $130,000 from Dane County, that effort involves the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, Dane County, and the city of Madison.

A second, broader and longer-term project is called the Yahara Lakes Legacy Partnership. Participants call this an unprecedented collaboration of public agencies and private organizations including local and state government, the business community, lake and neighborhood associations and environmental groups such as Clean Wisconsin and Gathering Waters Conservancy. Jim Lorman, Madison's representative on the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission and chairman of the legacy effort, said the project is broader than Yahara CLEAN and will work to create a public vision that can serve as a blueprint for managing the lakes in the future.

Public meetings will be scheduled later this spring and into the summer to unveil the projects and to collect public comment on the problems faced by the lakes as well as potential solutions.

A new level

Rarely have the lakes received such attention.

"There are obviously a whole lot of plans out there that haven't gone very far,'' Lorman said. "I think what makes this different is that it is an overall umbrella that engages everyone. It's getting beyond special interest groups and political jurisdictions."

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz agreed. "It's a level of cooperation we may not have seen in the past," Cieslewicz said.

Dick Lathrop, a limnologist who works with the DNR and UW-Madison, said he is hopeful the projects together can be more effective than past lake cleanup efforts because of a commitment to moving beyond talk and addressing problems in a practical way using science.

"We need to get the political will to solve the real problems," Lathrop said. "If this group can help focus on real solutions, that's great, as long as science is supporting the vision."

The most immediate and apparent problems — the pollution of the lakes by sediment and nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen and the resulting weed and algae growth — will be tackled over the next two years by Yahara CLEAN. Finding a way to reduce that runoff is the first and most important task, according to Lathrop. Such sediments come from farms in the form of manure and fertilizer, from the soil that runs off construction sites, from streets and parking lots, and from residential lawns.

A serious shot of those nutrients is likely to feed a bumper crop of algae this summer, Lathrop said. Excessive rainfall last August washed heavier amounts of material into the lakes than usual, including nutrients that will feed this summer's algae growths.

"You prime the pump," Lathrop said of the August rains. "You keep the nutrient levels in the lakes high."

Adding to that potential problem, Lathrop said, is a late winter that saw farmers spreading manure on frozen fields — prime conditions for runoff events in the spring during which manure sluices off thawing fields into streams and lakes.

Lathrop authored a report last year on the problems besetting the lakes and cited data collected between 1990 and 2006 that showed 48 percent of the phosphorus, a nutrient found in manure, enters the lakes from January to March each year. That's mostly due to late winter manure runoff, Lathrop said.

Yahara CLEAN had its beginnings with the threat late last year of Madison's lakes being placed on the state's list of impaired waters, so called because they do not meet standards set in the federal Clean Water Act. Rather than all the lakes, the city's beaches, — plagued by elevated bacteria levels and shutdowns the last several years — were placed on the list.

Still, that was a wake-up call, said Brett Hulsey, chairman of the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission and a leader in the Yahara CLEAN project. Following standards set in the Clean Water Act, the DNR is working with other Yahara CLEAN participants to set specific runoff levels by which progress toward cleanup can be measured. The Yahara CLEAN agreement signed by all the parties runs through the end of 2009, Hulsey said.

Buffer strips

The question on everyone's mind, of course, is how?

Hulsey said he expects the group will borrow heavily from the tactics outlined in the Lake Mendota Priority Watershed Program, followed by Dane County over the last 10 years. That plan has been very successful, according to Hulsey and others, and included working with farmers to better manage manure in barnyards and on fields, helping farmers build buffer strips to control erosion, putting in place plans to purchase a manure digester and purchasing wetlands.

Practical approaches were a hallmark of the priority watershed plan, Hulsey said. An example, he added, had to do with the problem of water running off barnyards and carrying with it manure that ended up in streams and lakes.

"The high-tech solution was gutters,'' Hulsey said.

As this project moves forward, he added, other practical solutions could range from skimmers to collect refuse from lakeshores to a special phone line on which citizens could report construction site erosion.

As Yahara CLEAN focuses on ways to reduce sediment and nutrient problems, the legacy partnership will begin looking at future management.

The partnership has set the following goals:

• Community ownership in a common vision for the lakes, resulting from extensive public participation.

• A single, over-arching plan for the Yahara chain with specific, measurable goals and timelines.

• A detailed outline of implementation steps, a road map that spells out specific steps, who is responsible, funding and what results can be expected.

• Collaboration among all political jurisdictions.

• Coordination with local watershed and neighborhood groups to take advantage of grassroots efforts.

An initial report will be put together over the next year with the help of $50,000 from the Madison Community Foundation and $25,000 from the city of Madison.

Finally, Lathrop, the DNR limnologist, said the payoff from such a concerted effort to reduce the nutrients that are dirtying up the lakes may come sooner than expected. In his report on Madison lake problems last year, Lathrop cited data that showed lake clarity improved dramatically after two drought seasons, one during 1987-88 and another in 2002-03, because of the reduction in runoff and nutrients.

"The lakes do clean up," Lathrop said. "You can see the lakes respond quickly."