The Colorado Dragon Boat Festival may be looking for a new home, but not by choice. The last couple of years at Sloan’s Lake have brought small challenges, from fish kills to upticks in blue-green algae in the heat of the summer.
Now, the Denver Parks & Recreation Department has closed off the lake for public use between July and August, forcing the Festival to move to September. If things get much worse, it may mean one of the area’s most popular weekends may be no more.
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“Within my move, I came out here and was really looking and searching for the Asian community, and the way I found that was through the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival,” said Sara Moore, the executive director of the festival.
She, like many, was once a Colorado transplant but found a circle of community through the Festival. Now, she runs the entire operation and is hoping that the city and county take the lake’s health seriously.
“I do think there’s obviously been a decrease of activity on the league just due to the health deteriorating,” she said.
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On average, the Colorado Dragon Boat festival sees roughly 200,000 people flock to the Edgewater area over the course of the weekend. Not wanting to leave Sloan’s Lake behind, Moore has gotten together with other advocates, like Kurt Weaver of the Sloan’s Lake Foundation, to see what can be done.
“It’s not going to be next year that the lake is no longer here, but certainly it is in the next several years that we’re going to see real bad impacts on the lake,” Weaver said.
Earlier in the year, a proposal to clean and dredge the lake was brought to the city as part of the Vibrant Denver Bond proposal package. The proposed $40 million would include habitat restoration, full dredging of the lake, filtration of storm drains as well as general improvements to make Sloan’s a destination again.
That $40 million is now just $5 million in the current iteration of the bond package, which still has to go to a city council vote and, if it passes, be approved by voters in November.
“The five million dollars that is tagged for environmental and aquatic improvements are some of the pre-hab things we need to do before we dredge the lake,” Weaver explained.
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Some of that work includes fixing shorelines and adding filters to the 23 area storm drains and two run-off ditches. Much of the sediment that pollutes the lake comes from those areas as Sloan’s maintains its water levels via runoff and rainwater.
Moore, preparing for another festival in September, knows the significance of the lake and those who use it. What she’s hoping for is that the move of the festival dates will raise awareness for the community to rally around the lake and show that it’s worth saving.
“Especially for the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, we don’t want to leave the city and county of Denver, and we don’t want to leave Sloan’s Lake,” she said.
The Colorado Dragon Boat Festival will be happening on September 6th and 7th.
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