The summit’s main portion featured a slate of experts speaking to a room of about 120, with additional people watching the event virtually on a live stream. Outside of the lecture room, vendor tables were set up for attendees to learn more about private contractors and public agencies, such as the state Department of Environmental Conservation, who were focused on spearheading efforts to reduce salt use while maintaining safe surfaces in winter. Outside the building, a portion of the adjacent municipal parking lot was closed off so vendors, contractors and highway departments could showcase their latest surface-treating technologies.

A wide array of stakeholders were in attendance, demonstrating salt’s far-flung impacts across the Northeast. Audience members included concerned citizens, local high school and college students, watershed association members, municipal highway department personnel, state Department of Transportation engineers and local officials.

The event kicked off with remarks from Chris Navitsky, the Lake George Waterkeeper for the Lake George Association, who organized the event, and Lake Placid Mayor Art Devlin.

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Paul Smith’s College President and former Adirondack Watershed Institute Executive Director Dan Kelting gives the keynote address Tuesday during the 9th annual Adirondack Champlain Regional Salt Summit in Lake Placid. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

“Just the right amount”

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After thanking everyone for attending, Devlin pivoted to describing the “extremely successful” efforts undertaken by Lake Placid to divert salt runoff away from Mirror Lake and the subsequent rehabilitation of the lake’s ecosystem.

“(One) of the improvements we made right off the bat was getting rid of our broadcast spreader. It had two settings: ‘off’ and ‘super turbo-charge.’ It was said that some of our salt spreaders could reach the second floor of the buildings on Main Street,” Devlin said as some in the audience chuckled.

The village replaced it with a drop spreader, which Devlin said was much more precise in where it spread the salt, allowing less usage.

A slide showing road networks and salt application across the Adirondack Park at the 9th annual Adirondack Champlain Regional Salt Summit held at the Lake Placid Conference Center on Tuesday. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

“In the past, it was very easy to say that if 10 pounds of salt was good, 20 had to be better,” Devlin said. He credited extensive research undertaken by scientists, both locally and nationally, for disproving this, and informing today’s best practices.

Devlin recognized and previewed one of those local scientists, Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute Executive Director Brendan Wiltse, who spoke later in the morning.

“He has been a godsend to our area, bringing scientific knowledge and common sense together,” Devlin said. “He has been able to bridge the gap between those who say, ‘No salt!’ and those who have to put it down to keep people safe,” he said.

Following the summit’s opening, attendees had the option to choose between two concurring sessions: hearing from scientists in the lecture hall or attending a training session in the vendor area on best practices for salt application.

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“We need to do better”

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The scientific presentation portion of the event featured two speakers: Dana Allen and Brendan Wiltse. Allen spoke first and described his work as an environmental consultant in Vermont to understand salt’s impacts in that state.

Allen described a need for improvements to site design considerations. Failure to do so in the past, he said, has led to a large number of Vermont residents having their water contaminated and the degradation of ecologically crucial wetlands.

A geographer, Allen focused much of his lecture on how poor planning with surrounding topography resulted in road salt storage sites leeching their contents into surface and groundwater. He argued that this could have been minimized or prevented if there was better knowledge on the unnecessary and preventable harm caused by salt contanimantion.

“The moral of the story (is) the monitoring isn’t working and neither are the management practices,” he said at the end of his remarks, which described a dearth of state and federal regulations surrounding salt contamination.

“It’s kind of sad. … We need to do better than this,” Allen said.

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A local success story

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Wiltse took the stage after Allen, with his lecture focused on Mirror Lake.

He described how the extensive development around Mirror Lake created a perilous situation for salt contamination.

“(The development) classifies Mirror Lake as an ‘urban lake,’ and there’s some irony in that because if you look out in the distance beyond the watershed, it’s surrounded by state-protected wilderness area,” Wiltse said.

He described the excessive concentrations of salt in Mirror Lake, which he said was fed by over 20 storm drains when he began “extensively monitoring” the lake in 2015.

“We found concentrations coming out of the stormwater system as high as 12,000 milligrams (of chloride) per liter of (water). If you don’t work with chloride concentration data, that number probably doesn’t mean very much to you. But, this is several times higher than both the acute and chronic toxicity thresholds for aquatic life set by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency),” he said.

Wiltse said the median salt concentration is 0.24 milligrams per liter in Adirondack lakes and streams not impacted by salt treatment use.

“This is many thousands of times higher than what we would expect,” he said.

Wiltse used the analogy of Italian salad dressing, that has not been shaken recently, to describe the lake’s state at the time.

“It was not mixing properly,” he said.

He attributed this to salt creating a dense layer of heavy water at the bottom of the lake that prevented regular turnover, or water mixing as the lake temperature changed with the seasons.

But, things soon changed.

Wiltse described a cascade of better practices that were established around Mirror Lake by 2020, which he said were led by the village but noted ample cooperation from local businesses and private residences. He described how sidewalks — which fully encircle the lake — were identified as a major contributor to the lake’s salt pollution, and how the village took steps to change that. This included changing the sidewalk surfaces in certain segments around the lake, a project that was made possible in part by state funding.

Wiltse also noted that the village changed both the mechanics of their snow removal, which Devlin detailed earlier and the timing, stating that faster removal during a snowstorm, as the snow is still falling, means that less salt has to be spread to make the surface safe.

Wiltse said the village let his team track the amount of salt used, which was important for his research in establishing a correlation between reduced salt use and eventual lake improvement.

Wiltse also said that strategic application on the roads was important, noting that the town of North Elba focused on applying salt in higher amounts near intersections and turns and less on straight sections of road.

Concurrent with improvements in treatment practices, Wiltse said the other major piece of the puzzle was the upgrade of the village’s stormwater system infrastructure.

“Since they were ripping up Main Street (to upgrade their water and sewer lines), they also looked at their stormwater system,” he said.

Wiltse said he was able to serve as an adviser throughout this process, and the municipality was receptive to the importance of stopping salt from flowing into Mirror Lake.

The new system diverted stormwater away from Mirror Lake. In emphasizing the toxic nature of the water, Wiltse said they were able to install monitors in the water that was no longer going into the lake, and what he saw was striking.

“The concentrations were so high that the data logger couldn’t read the conductivity (a surrogate for salt levels). We should have put a seawater-calibrated data logger in there but at the time, we didn’t really know what the maximum would be,” he said.

The investment soon began showing results. Wiltse displayed a chart that showed the chloride concentrations fell from about 160 metric tons in 2020 to about 120 at the beginning of 2024.

“We have restored the turnover of Mirror Lake to what it would naturally be,” he said.

Wiltse said his research was initially questioned by fellow academics who expressed doubt that a lake would respond so quickly and begin improving. He did not flinch.

“Our scientific reviewers challenged us on this, and we told them ‘Nope. We know this lake. If these practices were put in place, we knew the lake would respond quickly.’ They were, and it did,” Wiltse added.

Going forward, Wiltse said he hopes Mirror Lake serves as an example of what is possible for other watersheds currently damaged by salt.

The Lake George Association will post videos of the summit’s speakers at a later date. Those, along with previous years’ speakers, can be found at tinyurl.com/f6zkd5ad.