Pony up, Tempe, to end this Town Stink

Town Lake?

More like Town Stink.

A mess of algae, trash and dead critters is piling up near Tempe Town Lake's western dam, the locus of a much-used pedestrian bridge and the city's multimillion-dollar Center for the Arts.

Tempe is doing its best to skim off the garbage and treat the water now rife with fecal matter and other disgusting debris. But the rate of decay is dwarfing its efforts.

Construction has stopped indefinitely on the western-dam replacement, already on a tight deadline to be completed by December 2015. Lucrative lake events have been canceled.

And people are worried about a West Nile outbreak. This is a question of public safety.

It's also one of the city's reputation.

For better or worse, Tempe's image is inexorably linked with the lake. Thousands of people live and work within blocks of it, with more sleek high-rises on the way.

The city simply can't afford for the lake to be a pariah for long.

When its rubber dam burst in 2010, draining the state's second-most visited attraction in a matter of minutes, the exposed riverbed was rife with dead fish and noxious fumes.

But if Tempe can dredge the lake bottom, temporarily replace the dam and refill its banks with clean water in a mere 11 weeks, it can surely handle this latest round of storm runoff, record-breaking as it was.

It might take a few all-nighters and thousands of dollars in emergency funding. But those are the breaks when you maintain an oasis in the desert. The payoff may be huge, but so are the responsibilities.