The Fox river preservation Society is a true grassroots movement with no organizational or hierarchical structure. Comprised of St Charles and St Charles Township residents, we advocate for a common sense, factual based approach to dealing with the issues surrounding the St Charles Dam, and the very unique pool it created and today maintains. Through activism, engagement, and education we seek to bring balance to a very biased debate.

With 566 active members and over 9000 signatures to our “Save the Dam” petition we are confident that a majority of the local residence want to “Save the Dam” and preserve our beautiful pool and the ecosystem it supports.

Recently, we conducted a Poll of both our public and private Facebook page readers. We ask readers to choose between the following six options:

1) Let the dam be removed by either the ACOE or the IDNR.

2) St Charles should take title to the dam thereby assuming it’s maintenance and liability costs going forward and do no further work.

3) St Charles should take title to the dam and take the funds offered by the IDNR, which equal 60% of what the dams removal cost would be, and use those funds to perform a dam safety modification. The funds provided by the IDNR can only be used for a safety modification such as Rock Fill below the dam, giant Derrik stones to create a set of steps below the dam, A set of concrete steps similar to what Yorkville did or other actions to eliminate the reverse hydraulic roller at the bottom of the dam.

4) St Charles takes title to the dam, does not do a dam modification and therefore does not have access to those additional funds, but does do a low cost safety enhancement such as stringing a cable with buoys across the river above the dam like they have in Algonquin.

5) continue to investigate and seek funding for a project such as the Active River, where the dam would come out, but boulders or stepped weirs, or some other mechanism would be used to back the water up, but allow canoe and kayakers to transit the area, and maintain the pool at its current elevation north of the railroad trestle .

6) other suggestions… Please post them

The overwhelming response was number three. This Option was clearly identified by the IDNR in their 12/23 letter to the mayor of ST. Charles. (Click here to read the letter) . It is the opinion of the Fox River Preservation Society that this is the correct path to choose. We have confirmed with the IDNR that this route would be a fairly simple local government/state government agreement , would require no federal involvement, and further we confirmed that the IDNR has the funds to complete the project now.

Let’s get this done!