Regional sewer district revises Lower Lake recommendation, urges dam removal and stream restoration

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) told members of the Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights councils on Aug. 11 that it has changed its prior recommendation for Lower Lake and now favors removing the Lower Lake dam and restoring Doan Brook, rather than rebuilding the dam to current state standards.

The change matters because NEORSD said its new, higher‑resolution 2‑D modeling and predesign work show Lower Lake reconstruction would be costly and would not materially reduce flooding in the University Circle area; the district also highlighted the dam’s classification as a Class 1 high‑hazard dam under Ohio Department of Natural Resources rules and the potential for catastrophic downstream flooding if the dam failed.

Kyle Dreyfus Wells, NEORSD’s president and CEO, said the district did not make the change lightly. “We changed that recommendation based on new information we gathered and analyzed in 2024 and 2025,” he told both councils. Dreyfus Wells said the district completed predesign work for a reconstructed Lower Lake dam and used that analysis, plus newly deployed sensors and updated local storm‑sewer inputs, to revise its position.

Matt Sharver, NEORSD director of watershed programs, walked council members through the modeling and the engineering challenges. He said the Lower Lake dam is an earthen structure that would need to be entirely replaced — essentially with a large concrete gravity section, new principal and auxiliary spillways, removal of many trees adjacent to Coventry and North Park and substantial flood walls — to meet ODNR’s probable‑maximum‑flood requirement. Sharver said the probable maximum flood for a Class 1 dam equates to roughly 24–26 inches of rain in 24 hours.

Sharver summarized the cost estimates NEORSD generated during predesign: approximately $44 million to reconstruct a dam that meets state standards, plus roughly $12 million more to remove and properly dispose of an estimated 140,000 cubic yards of sediment in Lower Lake if the cities also wanted a restored, high‑quality lake — a $55…