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Approved 11/8/2010 OC Board of Adjustment – 10/11/2010 Page 14 of 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 the nutrients. They eat up the oxygen and then there is not enough oxygen for the fish and animals and so then you have a fish kill. The neighborhood had introduced some grass eating carp to eat all the algae so the water was nice and clear and all those died that we had bought. The bass and the brim that the pond was stocked with have died. The only change to that area in the last three years has been the changes instituted by the ag center which have been to cut down a lot of the trees between the cow pasture and the pond, to cut down the willow trees that were growing up around the pond and I think all that slowed down runoff. There’s an introduction of domestic geese and ducks which increase nutrients because of the waste they produce. While they were introduced to the lower pond when there are parties and things they pretty much come up to the upper pond and its gotten to the point where they’re mostly living on the upper pond now and most of the waste is going into that pond. Another thing that contributes to that is the low water level. There is a lot of water being pumped off that pond to irrigate the ag center gardens. We totally support those gardens but there is another pond on the other side of the Nutter’s driveway that could be used. There could be well water used. I don’t know what the other options are but it seems to me it would be really nice if we could talk about it and come up with some compromises about the huge volumes of water being drawn off as that contributes to the poor water quality. The combination of that and then the pump; this is the first I’ve heard that it’s only a five horsepower pump. It is very loud. We used to in the spring and fall have our family go down to the pond and have cookouts, have a fire circle and picnic table and a grill and a hammock and go out and have a cookout at least once a week when the weather was nice. The pond, the pump, sometimes, not always but sometimes it runs all day like from noon to six or seven at night. Sometimes it is just on for an hour or two or sometimes it’s not on and when we called and asked ‘well if we want to cookout down there can we turn it off?’ and they were like ‘oh no, it’s too complicated we don’t want you to do that.’ I think that we’ve been negatively impacted in that way. The fish kill, we called a lot of environmental clean up places and couldn’t find anyone to clean it up so we hired some teenage friends and all the neighbors went out with nets and we spend about four hours scooping up really, really smelly stinky dead fish and digging holes and burying them and getting rid of them because, theoretically, you can just let them rot but then you are increasing the nutrient content to the pond even further and you just compound the problem so we were advised that we should get rid of them and we did. It’s just not something that I would like to have to do again. I was told by a neighbor that has lived there much longer that about 11 years ago there was a much smaller fish kill and there was a severe drought and one end of the pond dried up and just there was some dead fish in the mud at that end of the pond but nothing like this has happened as long as anybody that lives in or neighborhood can remember. The only other thing I’d like to say about the parties, I think it’s great that there are little kids over there and I love walking out in my yard and hearing children’s voices laughing and playing and I don’t mind the hayrides however, late at night, like 9 pm last winter, my son was home alone and my husband and I had gone out and we got a phone call from him and he said that some of his friends that he knew had come over to our front door and could he let them in. I said ‘where did they come from’ and he said ‘oh they were at a party at the ag center but they said it go too crazy and they weren’t having fun so they walked over to our house’ so basically they walked out the back of the ag center and around two ponds and through the woods and came to up to our front door which I just don’t think is a good set up and of course we said ‘yes they can come in, tell them to come in and call their parents and they can stay for an hour’ but I think what people don’t realize is that this isn’t just like the back part may not be on the property but its not just the back lot of some production center. I was out there the other day with one of my horses and I looked across the pond and one of the workers from the garden was peeing in the grass. I called them the next day and I explained and he said ‘oh well we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again’ and I am not mad about that I want to make that clear but I just want to make it clear that there are families with young children and families who really love living there and we love our neighbor and we don’t want to hurt them. We don’t want the ag center closed down and we don’t want to shut down birthday parties and yoga classes and fieldtrips and hayrides but we would like a little peace and quiet. We don’t want music so loud that I can hear it in my house when my doors and windows are closed. I understand there are lots of venues around town that have indoor