Long-sought parking and lake access for Egremont residents are both connected to an agreement for dam-repair funds. Whether—and how—that will work, and what it will mean in practice, is complicated.
(This is the second of two parts. Read part one.)
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When I first called George McGurn, the chair of the Egremont Select Board, to discuss the condition of the dam on Prospect Lake, it was early on a rainy morning in mid-August—one of many such mornings during a spring and summer of frequent precipitation. “You know, when it rains all night, it makes me nervous,” he said.
A couple of weeks earlier, McGurn told the Select Board that heavy rains this year—he called one storm “a deluge”—had caused more damage to the essential-but-long-ailing dam that keeps the lake several feet higher than it would be otherwise.
Maintaining that water level is why a safe, fully functional dam is vital—and valuable—for owners of the 40-odd homes around and near the lake, and for others who have long enjoyed this Massachusetts “Great Pond” for swimming, boating, and year-round fishing. And, of course, the dam’s health is important to those who would be in the path of floodwaters should it fail.
McGurn, who was first elected in 2017, clearly enjoys talking about infrastructure. During that first hour-long conversation, we also discussed other dams in Egremont and the state-funded, eight-million-dollar, road-and-sidewalk project wrapping up in South Egremont—the small town’s modest commercial hub.
Perhaps he’s fond of the topic, he said, because he’s been around infrastructure since childhood: McGurn’s father, also named George McGurn, was an Illinois attorney with clients involved in transportation and construction. Prior to starting his own firm in the nineteen sixties, the elder McGurn also played a key role in establishing the first toll highways built around Chicago as an assistant attorney general and chief counsel for the Illinois Toll Highway Commission. And McGurn the younger’s long career in management, university administration, and international economic development included work on infrastructure projects in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, he told me.
Concerns about a privately owned dam
Central to any conversation about Prospect Lake Dam is that it’s privately owned, as are fifty-three percent of the roughly three thousand dams in Massachusetts. Located on the northern edge of the former Prospect Lake Park campground, the dam’s current owner is the Egremont real-estate developer, Ian Rasch, and his Alander Group investors. As reported in part one (and last year), they are creating a luxury “landscape hotel” on the twenty-five-acre property of the former campground, which they purchased along with an adjacent parcel nearly two years ago.
In Massachusetts, private-dam owners are responsible for their maintenance, operation, and any liability from dam failures. Which means the town, its residents, Rasch, and the dam are inextricably linked. “This is a private dam that puts a lot of private houses potentially in danger,” McGurn said at a Select Board meeting in late July.
