Indian Hills Community

We hope that all of you have enjoyed this 2022 lake season!  Today we’d like to provide an update on how we intend to move forward to address the road infrastructure in Indian Hills.

 One of the board and the community’s main priorities for the past several years has been road infrastructure, and there has been a great deal of background work completed by prior boards on the roads.  In 2016, the board commissioned a road study with BFA to evaluate the condition of our roads, and develop a cost estimate for repairing the road infrastructure. After the failure of a community vote in 2016 for several projects, subsequent boards made a decision to prioritize the Cove 9 bridge and the Lake Restoration effort. The Indian Hills community has taken substantial steps forward with the success of these two major projects over the last 5 years. These projects also have provided a blueprint for successful projects in our community:

1) Use professionals (engineers) to provide the community with an independent assessment of what is needed for our community (and not the opinion of board members or committee volunteers who may not be experts)

2) Involve volunteers outside of the board of directors to make recommendations and chart a path forward.

3) Engage with Members, be clear with project goals, and provide forums to solicit feedback from the community

The Cove 9 bridge project was successful due to the use of Cochran engineering, and most importantly an army of volunteers that provided their support for the project by leading information sessions and driving the design and construction phases. Lake Restoration’s success can be attributed to Ed Weston and Mike Schwartze’s truly remarkable efforts, the support of our partners at SIS Bio and Lake Restorative Services, and the widespread support across our community with volunteers pitching in across all facets of the project. The hallmark of these projects is that they were not “board led” – they were led by members of our community who had a vested interest in making sure that our community is moving forward.

Throughout 2022, the current board has held several discussions regarding what our path forward should be to address the road infrastructure. The board decided in April that we needed to update the 2016 engineering study, and invest in a more thorough ditch and culvert study to help determine what investments were needed to improve the road infrastructure. The board requested bids and selected Cochran Engineering to provide the studies. We have received the final reports and will be posting them on a new section of our website dedicated to Road Infrastructure.  The board has also been engaged with Central States Water Resources to discuss our project and they are ready to work with our community when we are ready.

We’d like to invite members to volunteer their time to the Road Infrastructure and Improvement effort. If you are interested, please email indianlake@ilpoa.org and include your contact info (name, address, email, and phone #). Please indicate in your message that you are interested in supporting this effort and willing to dedicate your time to it over the next 9-12 months. Ideally, we are looking for at least 50 committee members. We need to hear from members across the community including those who live on main roads and those that live on secondary roads. Also we need a mix of full and part-timers to volunteer and lend your voice to this project. We want to hear from everybody, and we want you to be a part of developing the solution to a problem that all of us have complained about for years.

We are excited to work together with the community to develop a strategy and path forward to address the roads in our beloved Indian Hills community!

ILPOA Board of Directors