Cazenovia Lake Association board member Jimmy Golub says 2026 is the peak year of a three year cycle, the point when the town funded weed harvester has the most work to do, based on figures the association published July 27.
Cazenovia Lake is 1,164 acres of water ringed by nine and a half miles of shoreline, and every summer since 2014 a single town-owned machine has cut an 11-foot swath through its Eurasian watermilfoil, one pass at a time. According to the Cazenovia Lake Association, 2026 is the year that machine has the most work to do.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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In a July 27 post on the association’s website, board member Jimmy Golub laid out why. The lake’s invasive milfoil is controlled on a three-year cycle: herbicide treatment, followed by two years of regrowth, followed by another treatment. “This year, being the third year since treatment we expect the most weeds,” Golub wrote. “Next year, after treatment, we would expect the fewest weeds.”
That means the harvester crew working the lake through Labor Day is cutting through the thickest milfoil growth of the cycle, right before the Town of Cazenovia and the association plan another herbicide application in 2027.
The harvester itself is a fairly simple machine doing a fairly unglamorous job. It cuts an 11-foot-wide path through the weeds, and a conveyor belt lifts the cut vegetation into an onboard holding area. The operator wears special glasses that help him track which sections of the lake he has already cut, then unloads the harvested weeds onto a second conveyor that fills a dump truck. The Town of Cazenovia bought the machine and, in Golub’s words, “with the help of your tax dollars,” pays the town highway department to run it. This is not contracted-out lake maintenance. It is a town crew and town equipment, funded through the tax roll, working a lake that borders both the village and the town.
Golub’s post gives two figures that, taken together, describe why the town bothers. In a typical year the harvester hauls about 85 loads of weeds off the lake. Each load weighs 15,000 pounds wet and carries roughly 4 pounds of phosphorus. Multiply those two numbers and a typical season removes about 340 pounds of phosphorus from the lake, weeds that would otherwise decompose in the water and release that phosphorus right back in.
Golub’s post does not total the figure across the harvester’s run, only noting that “adding that up for 12 years shows a real impact on the amount of nutrients in our lake.” Using the association’s own per-load numbers across those 12 seasons, from the harvester’s introduction in 2014 through this summer, a typical-year pace works out to roughly 4,080 pounds, or a little over two tons, of phosphorus pulled out of the lake rather than left to decompose and feed the next round of weeds. That is a rough figure, since real seasons vary with weather and where the lake sits in its three-year cycle, but it is the same math behind the number the association itself points to as evidence the harvester matters.
The reason phosphorus matters is the same reason the milfoil keeps coming back. “Weeds that aren’t harvested release more nutrients as they decompose, and those nutrients feed the very weeds we’re trying to control,” Golub wrote. “It’s a vicious cycle.” Phosphorus is the nutrient that drives weed and algae growth in freshwater lakes, and every pound the harvester hauls out as biomass is a pound that does not re-enter the water column when the plant dies and rots in place.
The state’s own numbers on Cazenovia Lake, published by the Department of Environmental Conservation, show how long this has been a managed problem rather than a new one. The lake was chemically treated for watermilfoil in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014, the same year the harvester came online as a mechanical backstop to the herbicide program. Milfoil is not native to the lake; it is an invasive species that historically choked shoreline growth out to about 15 feet of water, with the heaviest infestations at the lake’s north and south ends, according to the DEC.
Weed control has run alongside a separate DEC fisheries effort on the same lake. The department began actively managing Cazenovia Lake’s fish population in 2012, running electrofishing and gill-net surveys that caught 1,281 fish across 17 species. Largemouth bass dominated the catch at 38 percent (484 fish), followed by 190 yellow perch, 155 bluegill and 151 pumpkinseed sunfish. The gill nets also turned up 52 walleye, in a lake that had not been legally stocked with walleye since 1989. Follow-up surveys in 2013 and 2014 found almost no evidence the walleye were reproducing naturally, a single 17.6-inch, four-year-old fish in the 2013 electrofishing pass and zero fry in a 2014 trawling survey, so the DEC stocked roughly 22,000 to 23,280 walleye fry a year from 2015 through 2019, skipping 2016 for a hatchery shortage. The lake also carries a special DEC sunfish regulation: a 15-fish daily limit with an 8-inch minimum size, on top of standard statewide rules for bass and pickerel.
All of that fishing activity, and the swimming and boating that comes with a 1,164-acre lake bordering both the village and the town, depends on keeping the water passable. The DEC lists three public access points: McNitt State Park off East Lake Road, a hand-launch site with parking for 10 cars and posted hours of 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.; a Route 20 state Department of Transportation parking area, also hand-launch only; and Lakeside Park, a fee-based launch the Village of Cazenovia operates seasonally. Largemouth bass in the 15-inch range are common, with some fish reported each year in the 20-inch range, and the DEC notes the lake’s north end, the same stretch that has historically carried the heaviest milfoil growth, as a popular spot for ice fishing black crappie and bluegill after the water freezes over.
The weeds themselves used to have a second life on a nearby farm. For several years, Golub’s own property, which he calls Our Farm, received the harvested weeds pulled from the lake’s north end. Left in a dump-truck pile over winter, the mostly-water plant matter broke down into what Golub described as roughly a pickup-truck’s worth of compost, which he tilled into his fields with a tractor loader. He said the treated ground held water better and felt spongier underfoot, with more organic matter than untreated soil.
That arrangement came with a cost Golub is still dealing with. He stopped receiving the weeds six years ago, and he says he is still pulling garbage out of that field: yogurt containers, bottles, cans, rope, buoys, plastic of every kind, cups, styrofoam, lumber scraps, bottle caps, gloves, broken glass, hats, socks and fast-food wrappers, all of it originally dumped or blown into the lake and then hauled out along with the weeds. “This is our lake, please don’t use it as a giant trash can,” Golub wrote. “A lot of it ends up on our fields.”
The lake’s weed and phosphorus problem is not only a surface issue. Article XIV of the Town of Cazenovia’s code establishes the Cazenovia Lake Watershed District specifically to limit nutrient loading from wastewater, on the theory that failing septic systems are as much a phosphorus source as decomposing milfoil. Any wastewater system in the watershed district that is not under continuous DEC or county health department supervision has to meet town design standards, and no untreated wastewater may be discharged into any watercourse in the district. The code sets a rotating five-year septic inspection and pump-out schedule that moves by road segment, starting with East Lake Road properties in year one and working around through North Lake Road, the Owahgena and West Lake Road corridor, Hedge Lane, and Syracuse Road before the cycle repeats. Property owners also face a required septic inspection at the point of any property transfer or refinancing.
None of that regulatory structure shows up on the water. What shows up is a machine cutting an 11-foot path through the lake most days this summer, run by highway department staff, paid for out of the town budget, working through what the people who track it call the peak year of its cycle. Boaters and paddlers who found the lake noticeably weedier this year are not imagining it; the timing lines up with the numbers the association itself published. The next herbicide treatment, and the calmer water Golub says should follow it, is not scheduled until 2027, which means this year’s harvester crew has one more full season of peak growth to cut through before the cycle resets.
Sources and verification
This report is built from three primary documents fetched directly for this story: the Cazenovia Lake Association’s July 27, 2026 post “Harvesting Weeds in 2026,” written by association board member Jimmy Golub, which supplied the harvester specifications, load and phosphorus figures, treatment-cycle timing, and the farm-compost account; the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Cazenovia Lake page, which supplied the lake’s physical statistics, herbicide treatment history through 2014, and the DEC fisheries survey and stocking data; and Article XIV of the Town of Cazenovia Code, “Cazenovia Lake Watershed District,” which supplied the septic and wastewater regulatory framework covering the same watershed. The 4,080-pound, 12-season phosphorus estimate is CNY Signal’s own calculation, built directly from the association’s published per-load figures, and is labeled as an estimate rather than a figure the association itself published.
