Mayor's Monday Mailbag - What can be done about the smelly gunk that accumulates at the Beach?

Welcome to the Mayor's Monday Mailbag, a new initiative Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward and the Mayor's Office is launching where we will share, weekly, answers to questions from the public we've received through our main email inbox at mayor@burlington.ca or the Mayor's social media platforms.At the end of the month, we'll publish a roundup of those most pressing questions we've received in the weeks prior.Mayor's Monday Mailbag - June 14, 2021QUESTION:I thought the idea of charging for parking at Beachway was to offset the cost of beach maintenance, so why hasn't the beach shoreline been cleared of the awful smelly gunk that collects there?ANSWER:The parking fees introduced at Beachway Park on weekends (Saturdays & Sundays) from May-September are for extra staffing and other measures required to manage the parking lots -- and to prevent illegal parking.City of Burlington staff maintain the beach at Beachway Park and are aware of the sludge that accumulates there from time to time. Staff regularly monitor the area and remove the sludge when it accumulates on the beach, but in the interest of staff safety and due to environmental reasons, we are unable to deal with it while it is still in the water as our equipment is not amphibious, rather land-bound. As soon as it is on the sand, staff collect it with equipment and dry it off for ease of disposal (it is extremely heavy while saturated). The area is monitored on a regular basis to remove it as soon as it is on the sand and possible to do so.The reality is that this occurs due to the weather and is not something we can schedule maintenance for. It can come and go over night or a storm can come in after the beach was cleared, and completely replace it with new sludge. The heat and wind direction is a contributing factor to the buildup of sediment and algae which occurs naturally and will dissipate on its own.RELATED: Algae noticed around the Rambo Creek area and in other spots along the lakeWe don’t have any in-house expertise at the City of Burlington with respect to algae, but it does appear consistent with algae we have seen in the past - particularly last year near the Royal Botanical Gardens and LaSalle Park. Staff reached out to one of the biologists at Conservation Halton, providing a photo for their interpretation, and they concurred that it is algae.Due to the low water levels across Lake Ontario and all of our creeks, a lot of algae is visible and Conservation Halton has been getting reports/complaints about it as early as mid-April.  Its very likely going to be a big algae year, this year, and we suspect that there will be more reports of it along the shoreline as the summer proceeds. As the hot weather continues on, the algae will actually start to decompose as it sits along the shoreline, and as it does, it will begin to smell like sewage.--*Posted by John Bkila, Mayor's Media and Digital Communications Specialist