It clearly has potential to be more attractive and a better recreational resource, and city officials and the staff at the Fund for Lake Michigan are working on doing something about that. The fund and the city are each putting up $20,000 to develop plans to improve the water quality in the lagoon. The city also has plans to dredge the lagoon.

This would be a huge improvement for the park.

Several months ago, I suggested in a column that doing more to develop water resources would be good for the community in the long run. This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.

Vicki Elkin, executive director of the Fund for Lake Michigan, said she thinks the pond has a lot of potential with dredging and some significant changes to the landscape around the pond.

“By just having the right plantings in there, you could make a lot of progress,” she said in a phone interview. “I think we could return it to being an asset. It could be a nice place for an afternoon paddle.”

Other communities, she said, have had similar water bodies with similar challenges, and they’ve been able to improve them. Part of the solution is often planting different types of vegetation to filter pollutants out of the water before it flows into the pond.