CANAAN — It takes less than 30 seconds for Michael Riese to get from his front door to Goose Pond’s shore. The pond is why he and his wife, Allison, bought their house, named “Island View,” according to the wooden sign that hangs from its deck.
On Tuesday, Riese, 67, wearing three layers of green and an embroidered Goose Pond hat from years ago, swung open the gate that protects his private beach and settled onto a picnic table, his back to the 625-acre pond. Much of his retired life revolves around this body of water, which has been designated a “great pond” by the state.
To Riese’s right sat fellow retiree Ken Milkie, 73, who lives across the pond and serves as vice president of the Goose Pond Lake Association. Riese has been president since 2009.
Riese has spent most of his 17 years at the helm of the association monitoring water quality, organizing boat inspections, weed watching and writing newsletters for its 200-plus members.
Now, though, residents around the pond are pulling their boats onto shore, and rather than monitoring its quality, Riese is tracking the water’s height. For the third time in four years, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services is draining Goose Pond to work on its dam, and Riese, Milkie and their neighbors are tired of it.
“This has dragged on for so long,” Riese said. “It’s like Groundhog Day. It’s been very frustrating.”
Corey Clark, chief engineer for the Department of Environmental Services (DES) Dam Bureau, gave a presentation to association members in 2021 on the state’s plan to renovate the dam, which was built in 1918 and is classified by the state as a “high-hazard” dam, meaning its failure would likely cause loss of life. DES projected a construction start date in spring 2024 and an end date in winter 2024-25.
Goose Pond area residents weren’t thrilled about the original plan to drain their beloved lake, but they understood the project’s importance and, according to Riese, were fine with it.
“All we asked was: start on time, finish on time,” he said. And that hasn’t happened.
The initial renovation project started later than DES planned, was understaffed and ran behind schedule, according to Riese. DES didn’t start refilling Goose Pond until June 2025, meaning the lake was out of commission for its second summer in a row. Then DES tested the dam’s new gates and found that one was not sealing properly. The lake wasn’t fully refilled yet — it was about 5 feet lower than normal — but to prevent more drainage, the department sent divers to the dam gates to try to fix them. But the effort failed, and DES drained Goose Pond again in November 2025.
After a — supposedly — successful review by the gate manufacturers, the state began its second refill in January. But as summer hit Canaan, DES realized two of the gates on Goose Pond’s dam had manufacturing defects and needed to be completely replaced. Goose Pond residents got their first summer on the water in three years before the third drain began Oct. 1.
“After reviewing during the summer of 2026 of how to replace the two faulty gates with divers, a cofferdam or by lowering the pond, it was determined that the safest and most efficient and effective means of replacing the gates would be to lower Goose Pond,” Clark said in an email to the Valley News.
Standing in front of Island View, Riese turned to Goose Pond and held his hands up, one about a foot and a half above the other. That’s how much lower the lake looked to him, five days into the drain.
The dam’s failed repairs and repeated redoes have not cost local taxpayers. The renovation project has cost about $8.5 million in total, but federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act have paid for most of it. Less than $1 million came from the state, through the New Hampshire Governor’s Office for Emergency Relief and Recovery.
This next phase isn’t costing taxpayers anything, since Michels Construction, the company contracted to renovate the dam originally, and McWane, the gate manufacturer, accepted responsibility for the faulty gates and are paying for the new project themselves, which Clark explained in a September Canaan selectboard meeting. DES is withholding $250,000 from contractors until the proper gates are installed.
Still, living on the water is expensive. In 2025, Canaan had the fifth-highest tax rate of any town in New Hampshire, at about $31.20 per $1,000 of assessed value, according to the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration. Property values are higher on the waterfront, so property taxes are, too. Though these houses have been on the water only sporadically over the last few years, they are still valued as waterfront property, which means owners are paying for a pond they can’t use.
What really rattles Riese and Milkie is the ecological impact of continuously draining and refilling Goose Pond. The lake association has always celebrated its unusually high water quality and lively, diverse wildlife. They say draining the pond into other bodies of water and then slowly refilling it, over and over again, has disrupted its ecosystem.
“Where do the fish go? Where do the turtles go? Where do the mollusks go?” Riese asked. “These things died. They went downstream. They didn’t reproduce. We had loons that used to reproduce and nest every year until 2023. We haven’t had a loon or a loon chick since then.”
Riese said New Hampshire wildlife biologists told him Goose Pond’s water quality has dropped from above average to around the state average. Even a small drop makes a difference to association members. Riese bought his house in Canaan largely because the land around Goose Pond remained relatively undeveloped, keeping the water quality high, he said. When the lake was drained during the summer of 2024, community members organized a cleanup of the basin: It’s a nature-focused pond (even though damming turned a small natural pond into a lake), not one crawling with motorboats or jet skis.
“Fourth of July, there might be four power boats out there,” Milkie said, laughing.
A few Goose Pond residents have suggested to Riese and Milkie that they would like to hire lawyers to sue the state for the mishandling of the project. Recounting this, Riese shrugged.
“What are we going to do? The state owns the lake,” he said. “We just need to get this behind us.”
Riese credited Clark at DES for transparency throughout the process, and stressed that the association doesn’t blame the builders who worked on the project — it actually hosted a pizza party for site workers during the original renovation. Riese’s frustration is with those meant to oversee the project, which he said “screams mismanagement.”
He and Milkie stood up from the picnic table. Behind them, a giant, bright-yellow face peeked out from between a cluster of trees: Allison Riese painted this enormous duck on a wooden cutout in 2018 for the annual Goose Pond boat parade. It lives on the shore of what, for now, still looks like a beautiful, deep-blue lake, peppered with crystals of sunlight. Milkie said the pond looks different every time he sees it, blue or white as the day moves along.
Soon enough, though, he’ll look out at the lake and see a basin of mud, spotted with boulders.