The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District shocked residents in Cleveland’s East Side Suburbs in late July when it revealed to Ideastream Public Media that it wants to remove the Lower Lake Dam and drain Lower Lake to reduce the chance of a catastrophic flood downstream along Doan Brook in Cleveland’s University Circle.
The district now wants to replace the lake with 17 acres of low-lying parkland, an approach similar to the plan the sewer district has for the former Horseshoe Lake about a mile upstream from Lower Lake. The district drained Horseshoe Lake in 2019 under orders from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which said the dam could fail and cause flooding.
For some residents, the switch on Lower Lake revived bitter memories of their unsuccessful efforts to save Horseshoe Lake. Critics on social media and at Monday’s meeting of Cleveland Heights City Council said the district had lied about its stated intention to save Lower Lake.
A new idea
A new twist is that the district now says that before finalizing its plans, it will explore whether at least part of Lower Lake could be saved.
That potential plan would be modeled after a project completed last year by Cleveland Metroparks at Garfield Park in Garfield Heights, where Wolf Creek has been rerouted around a roughly two-acre pond to avert flooding and the buildup of silt. A similar re-routing of Doan Brook might make it possible to save at least part of Lower Lake, sewer district officials said.
“A lot of people have talked about a Garfield Park-like amenity’’ at the site of Lower Lake, Kimberly Colich, the district’s stormwater program manager, said in an interview. “That's something we'll take a look at.’’
Colich said the district’s goal would be to see whether it can “change the landscape a little, but enable some kind of water body to remain’’ at Lower Lake.
The project at Garfield Park was undertaken by the Metroparks in 2022 through 2024. It recreated a pond in the Garfield Park Reservation that had filled with 60 years’ worth of silt conveyed by Wolf Creek during heavy development upstream, outside of the park.
Wolf Creek, a tributary of Mill Creek, which enters the Cuyahoga River in Cuyahoga Heights, now flows around the reconstituted pond in Garfield Park, from which it is separated by a berm with a walking trail on top.
The $7 million project enables Metroparks to allow controlled amounts of water from the creek to flow into and out of the pond. The idea is to keep the pond healthy without allowing it to silt up again.
The sewer district supported the Garfield project with $2.74 million from its stormwater reimbursement fund. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency contributed $300,000 and another $2 million came from philanthropy.
Colich and Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, the sewer district’s CEO, said the exploration would occur in the upcoming “pre-design’’ phase of a new examination of how best to approach flood control along Doan Brook. That work, which doesn’t yet have a price tag, will likely start in 2026, said Jennifer Elting, the district’s spokesperson. The district said it’s too soon to discuss a Garfield Park approach at Lower Lake in any detail.
Going public on Lower Lake
At the district’s board meeting on Thursday, a staff member gave the first detailed public presentation of its new position on Lower Lake. Matt Scharver, the district’s director of watershed programs, said the district’s views changed as new information emerged from research after October 2024, when it announced its earlier plan to save Lower Lake.
The district didn’t discuss any potential project akin to the Garfield Park pond at Thursday’s meeting.
The district has scheduled additional meetings on the future of Lower Lake. They include:
- A 7 p.m. public meeting today at Shaker Heights City Hall, 3400 Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights officials will attend remotely. Viewers can register to watch online via NEORSD.org/lowerlake. The suburbs originally said the meeting would be private, an executive session of the council.
- A webinar on Zoom, Tuesday, Aug. 19 from 6-7:30 p.m. Preregistration is required at NEORSD.org/lowerlake.
- Two open houses on Wednesday, Aug. 20 for in-person conversations with sewer district staff members at the Heights Libraries, 2345 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5-7 p.m. No registration is required.
In addition, Ideastream Public Media will hold a live “Sound of Ideas” Community Tour event on Monday, Aug. 18 from 6-7 p.m. at the outdoor pavilion at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, 2600 S. Park Blvd., Shaker Heights. Stakeholders, including the sewer district’s CEO and the mayor of Shaker Heights, will be part of the forum and members of the audience will have opportunities to speak. Admission is free, but registration is required at ideastream.org/communitytour.
The dangers of failing
Lower Lake and the other Shaker Lakes, including Horseshoe, Green and Marshall lakes, are vestiges of agricultural infrastructure established along Doan Brook roughly 180 years ago by the North Union Shakers.
The sewer district today oversees flood control around Doan Brook as part of its responsibility to manage storm runoff across its 363-square-mile service area in Northeast Ohio. It has spent more than $195 million over the past decade to reduce flooding and sewer overflows in the Doan Brook’s 12-square-mile watershed.
That work included digging a deep tunnel to prevent combined sewers from washing human waste into Lake Erie during heavy rains. Dreyfuss-Wells said the tunnel is unrelated to the hazards of a potential dam failure at Lower Lake.
Doan Brook rises in several branches in Shaker Heights that converge east of Lower Lake before passing through University Circle and Cleveland’s Cultural Gardens and then flowing into Lake Erie.
The brook and more than 300 acres of parkland through which it flows are owned by the City of Cleveland. Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights lease roughly 200 acres of parkland within their boundaries from Cleveland. The leases obligate the suburbs to maintain the properties, which include the dams.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has said the dams don’t meet standards requiring them to allow water from roughly 24 inches of rain in 24 hours to flow through their spillways without collapsing, Scharver said.
That standard is far more stringent than the federal definition of a 100-year storm as one that drops 5.5 inches of rain in 24 hours, district officials said. Nevertheless, the ODNR standard is the one the district needs to meet if it wanted to replace the Lower Lake Dam and preserve the lake, Scharver said.
Water from Lower Lake now spills onto neighboring streets, including Coventry Road, during anything greater than a 2-year storm that drops roughly 2.5 inches of rain in 24 hours, Scharver said. Such an event occurred most recently in 2021.
Changing course
Scharver and Dreyfuss-Wells said that the district reversed course on keeping Lower Lake after completing a $1.7 million “predesign’’ exploration of the proposed dam reconstruction in late 2024.
That work overlapped with a different, new study exploring whether an additional culvert at Wade Lagoon in University Circle would reduce flood hazards along Doan Brook. The work on a new culvert, which hasn’t yet been priced, should begin in 2027 or 2028, Scharver said. The historic landscape at Wade Lagoon won’t be affected, he said.
Timelines provided by the district support its contention that it didn’t switch its position on Lower Lake until it gathered new flood modeling data months after it told the public in October 2024 that it could preserve Lower Lake.
The new data included information from six new flow monitors installed along Doan Brook, in addition to the one that had been used for previous analyses. Computer modeling of potential flooding is also based on more detailed analysis of storm sewers in the Doan Brook watershed.
The data added to the district’s conclusion that removing the Lower Lake Dam and restoring Doan Brook would reduce the risk of flooding significantly, whereas the return on investment for keeping the dam would be minimal, Scharver said.
District officials also developed qualms about the cost and aesthetics of replacing the 19th-century earthen dam at Lower Lake with large concrete structures robust enough to meet the standards set by ODNR.
“The visuals, the aesthetics of the environmental impact of this dam started to look worse and worse,’’ Scharver said. “The costs keep going up and up.”
Replacing the Lower Lake Dam would cost $43.4 million, far more than the district originally estimated before completing its predesign study. In addition, the district estimated the cost of dredging the lake, now filling with silt, at $12 million.
Removing the dam and reconstructing Doan Brook in the lakebed as the centerpiece of a new nature park like the one to be built in 2025 at the Horseshoe Lake site would cost $37.9 million.
But in new figures described by the district at Thursday’s meeting, another $7.4 million in work is needed to reduce flood hazards at the intersections of Coventry and Fairhill roads. The new estimated total for all the work is now $45.3 million, which the district is willing to pay.
Who decides
Whether to remove the Lower Lake Dam is up to the suburbs, Dreyfuss-Wells said. However, the district wouldn’t allow its stormwater funds to be used for retaining the dam because it doesn’t solve the potential flooding problem. Other entities would have to foot the bill.
At Thursday’s meeting of the sewer district board, President Darnell Brown said the concerns of residents and property owners in Cleveland downstream from Lower Lake needed to be considered, along with those of suburban residents upstream.
“While the dam structure is one thing, people at the bottom of the hill are important,’’ he said. Their need for safety “is an important variable that we [need to] weigh as part of our deliberations here.’’
