Boaters on Lake Carroll can break out the lifejackets now that Carrollton engineers are allowing the lake’s waters to rise again, thanks to cost-saving efforts to avoid a total reconstruction of the dam there.

“The state government wanted the dam to be replaced and there was nothing really wrong with it,” City Council member Dr. Peter Balega said.

Specifically, Safe Dams, a division of the Environmental Protection Division, told city officials five years ago that Lake Carroll’s dam was not up to modern safety standards. The Lake Carroll dam, built in the 1940s, needed its spillway to be thickened, among other things.

“It’s basically a thin, concrete slab where most of the storm water goes through,” Tom Lewoosley, program manager for permits and compliance for Safe Dams, said in May. A spillway should be a channel around the dam where excess water is released.

Officials from Safe Dams wanted improvements, including an emergency spillway, to be upgraded in the Lake Carroll dam, and the city hired Alpharetta-based Schnabel Engineering to design it.

That design included major renovations, so city engineers began to drain Lake Carroll more than they normally would to lower the water enough for work on the dam to begin. The lake is now three feet lower than it normally would be, City Manager Casey Coleman said.

But city engineers took another look at the dam, and realized they could avoid a total reconstruction and still comply with state regulations. They have stopped excessively draining the lake, so, with rain, the water will rise.

“It should fill up surprisingly fast,” Coleman said.

Council member Rusty Gray said area residents should be pleased.

“With residents living around the lake and looking at a (originally projected) 18 months of dry lake, they weren’t real happy,” Gray said. “So they’re excited to see it filling up again.”

The city will also save money by making smaller-than expected improvements to the dam. Coleman said the budget for the dam - taken from 2003 special purpose local option sales tax revenues - was about $2 million. The revised estimate is now about $1.3 million. He said the city had not yet set a date for the improvements to begin.

Some or all of the money saved will be routed to building a new reservoir pond for the city’s water supply, Balega said.

Carrollton currently draws drinking water from Lake Carroll, Sharp Creek Reservoir and Lake Buckhorn. A reservoir pond will help to capture any excess water from those three bodies, thus preventing waste.

That’s something especially important during this time of drought, according to Balega, who is also a member of the Carroll County Water Authority.

“(Letting the lake refill) will give us 30 days more of water (for the city),” he said. “If we ever get down that far.”