Maine Lakes Society

Education and outreach are core to maine lakes mission. In 2024, we continued our look out for loons programing, engaging 70 volunteers who gave presentations, held tabling events, collected lead sinkers, and lead field trips highlighting ways to reduce disturbance to loons and increase their success. Our freshwater education network project continued to grow, with tamara whitmore as a program manager and with successful grant funds in hand. We officially sold out/gave away all of our lake books (a handbook for lakeside living that highlights things people can do to protect their lake), and will work to update and revise the text for an updated edition in 2025. We continued to grow our lake library and other online resources, and gave presentations about lake conservation and lakesmart at 12 venues in 2024, including the water and sustainability conference and the annual maine lakes monitoring meeting. We met with lake associations throughout the year and gave presentations at annual meetings around a variety of lake topics. We published 8 issues of our maine lakes e-news plus two special editions geared to our lake association members.

Maine lakes once again partnered with lake stewards of maine to co-host the annual lakes conference, held on june 13th at the university of maine at farmington. We had record attendance, with over 345 registrants, 12 speakers and a panel of lake association volunteers. Our theme was the value and legacy of maines lakes and our keynote speakers (adam daigneault and melissa genoter from the university of maine) shared an overview of a three-year economic study they had completed valuing the lakes of maine. Other speakers addressed a broad range of topics, including the mythical creatures of maines lakes, a new scorecard for lakes, an updates on invasive plants, and much more. A silent auction associated with the conference once again brought in much needed funds to help defray conference costs.

The maine lakes advocacy program includes a wide range of activities focused on sharing information with members, colleagues, agencies and decision-makers about proposed state legislation. Because 2024 was the second session of the legislature, we spent less time tracking lake bills than in 2023. However, there were several vital bills that needed extensive outreach to both legislators and to activists. We sent three legislative alerts to our network of 500 grassroots activists for action on bills to increase funds for invasive species risk reduction, enable municipalities to put liens on properties in gross violations of shoreland zoning laws, and create a setback from shore for wakesurfing. Activists came through with testimony and phone calls in support of lake protection. Maine lakes had an on-line training for lake advocates in january, and worked throughout the summer building a lake protection coalition that it hopes will help build capacity for more and stronger partnerships around community organizing and lake advocacy efforts in 2025. This coalition building work resulted in larger spending in the advocacy program than is typical for maine lakes.