For decades, people in far southwestern Canadian County and beyond have come to Cedar Lake to swim, fish and boat, using it as a getaway oasis in an oftentimes arid and drought-ridden western Oklahoma.  But the lake has gone lower each year. Docks now sit on the dirt shoreland, far from the w aterline. Water from nearby streams that would usually refill both the lake and private water wells has slowed to a trickle.   It’s not from drought, though. Many residents blame a wealthy and politically connected upstream neighbor who’s bought hundreds of acres of surrounding land and built dams on family property. Former Oklahoma Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn Coffee and his father, Virgil, own the neighboring land through two companies, CF Ranch LC and Coffee Grounds LLC.  The water woes at Cedar Lake are reaching emergency levels. Some residents have resorted to hiring trucks to supplement their now-meager private well supplies. Others are watching as their wells bring up not water, but a sandy mix that makes it impossible to cook, clean or bathe.  Anneliese Herren moved to Cedar Lake a dozen years ago because she liked the lake life. Now, her water has reached critically low levels, forcing her to decide if it’s a day for hair washing or a day for laundry. She’s replaced her pump six times and had to buy water almost a dozen times at $100 a tank.  “The docks are going dry, and we can’t get the boats hardly in the water,” Herren said. “My neighbor has a boat, but he can’t use it. How ridiculous is that? People’s wells are running dry, and they can’t sell their house. You can’t sell a house without water. They’re stuck.”  After two years without reliable running water, neighbors recently helped Belinda Smith get a water trailer and pump hooked up to her rented house at Cedar Lake. She uses the water to wash her dishes and take showers, but she doesn’t use it for cooking or laundry. Smith used to pay $375 a month for the rental, but the landlord cut the rent to $200 a month when her water went out. She survives on close to $1,000 per month.   “I’ve looked and looked and looked to try to move from here, but you’ve got to be kidding me about the rent,” Smith said as she showed off the 275-gallon tank outside her house. “People want $1,800 for rent and $1,800 for a deposit. It’s ridiculous, so I just stay here. Whatever help I can get, I appreciate it. God sends a lot of people to you.”  A complaint about the dams, filed more than a year ago, remains pending before the Oklahoma Water Resources Board. It claims the Coffee family built unlicensed upstream dams that capture the stream water that feeds Cedar Lake.  Glenn Coffee said in a July 20 email that because of threatened legal action, he didn’t want to discuss the matter publicly.  “As soon as my parents were made aware of the issue regarding their ranch in Canadian County by the Water Board, our family has retained two engineering firms and a lawyer to guide us in these matters,” Coffee said in the email.   On July 21, dozens of Cedar Lake residents crammed into a meeting room as the board heard about the Cedar Lake water woes and considered a consent order over the unlicensed Coffee dams. The board put off further action until its September meeting.  Lots Sold at State Fair Cedar Lake dates to 1956, built by Western Sportsman Club Inc., a private development company. State water board records show the company applied for a surface water permit in 1960 for a 75-acre lake. The lake lots, some with 360-square-foot cabins, used to be sold at the Oklahoma State Fair each fall.  Over the years, as lots and cabins got sold or passed down to the next generation, many longtime residents moved away or died. What remains is an unincorporated community of about 1,100 people, split between full-time residents and others who own weekend getaways.  Don Machacek, 71, who is restoring one of those weekend getaways, described the area as a blue-collar lake. Few spots sell for more than $300,000, he said, and even then, they might be next door to a run-down, abandoned shack.  “There’s a little bit of a mix of everything out here,” Machacek said as he drove around the community on a recent July weekday. “There’s some attorneys out here, there’s plumbers, there’s contractors, there’s just regular folks. If my mother or older sister were still alive and wanted a safe place to live, I’d put them out here.”  Longtime residents said the lake is the lowest they’ve seen in decades. After rain, water used to flow regularly over the spillway of Cedar Lake Dam, which was built in 1959. It doesn’t anymore.  An Overnight Disappearance This isn’t the first time Cedar Lake residents have faced an existential threat. A weird quirk of geology drained the lake practically overnight back in 1986. Newspaper reports blamed a school-bus-sized gypsum cavern that formed under the lakebed and eventually collapsed. Water and fish undercut the earthen dam and emerged down a small creek on the other side.  Cedar Lake residents Bobby Kirkland, left, and Nate Smith look across a fence line to a small lake on land owned by the Coffee family in Canadian County on Thursday, July 16, 2026. Residents claim an illegal dam is affecting a stream that feeds Cedar Lake. (Paul Monies/Oklahoma Watch) Chris Armstrong said the lake’s disappearance broke his mother’s heart. His parents were among the first to buy lots at Cedar Lake, and he spent his childhood there. Among his earliest memories was driving with his parents in an old black Nash car on the property, before the dam was built. Still, Armstrong said the 1986 lake disappearance had a tiny silver lining: it allowed his family to rebuild their boat dock.  “It turned into a Martian landscape for 12 acres on the backside of where the water came back up because it pulled all the red silt out of it,” Armstrong said. “That was fun to walk around on. So alien.”  To make the repairs, Western Sportsmen Club levied a $1,000 special assessment on all the stockholders, he said. They hired Halliburton to pump a concrete-sand mix into the collapsed gypsum cavern. Then the Water Board made them remove and replace a third of the dam, which put additional expenses on the lot owners.  Dam No. 6 Inspection Report  After receiving a complaint in May 2025, dam inspectors from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board visited the Coffee dams last summer. The state regulates all dams higher than 25 feet or that hold back at least 50 acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot of water is enough to cover a football field with a foot of water; it’s equivalent to approximately 326,000 gallons.) In their report, inspectors found Coffee Dam No. 6 had a height of 33 feet and had maximum storage capacity of 119 acre-feet.   A June 17, 2025, memo in the case file said the dam appeared to be in fair condition overall. Most of the component parts of the dam were in satisfactory condition. But inspectors found some problems with the outlet.  “There were no erosion protection or energy dissipation structures around the outlet,” the report said. “Noted deficiencies include minor erosion around the outlet, excessive ponding at the outlet, and excessive vegetation growth around the inlet and outlet points. The outlet pipe was fully submerged at the time and the inlet could not be inspected due to the heavy brush growth.”  Coffee told inspectors he uses the dam to impound water for his cattle. The contractor, Bobby Herbert, said the dam was about six years old and was constructed in accordance with his knowledge of federal National Resources Conservation Service dam standards.  In a June 30, 2025, violation letter, the Water Resources Board told the Coffees they could either remove or reduce the size of the dam. Alternatively, they could hire a professional engineer and submit a dam construction application. The agency’s regulations allow for dam owners to obtain permits after construction.  Since then, Water Resources Board officials have granted the Coffees several extensions to the original Aug. 31, 2025, deadline.  Apart from the dam application, Coffees’ companies in March filed applications for stream water permits on their properties. Those applications remain pending.  In a splash of irony, the state’s stream permit application includes a reference to limits on streams in southeastern Oklahoma. Glenn Coffee, who is an attorney and was a secretary of state under Gov. Mary Fallin, was instrumental in negotiating a 2016 water rights settlement between the state, Oklahoma City and Native American tribes for Sardis Lake in southeastern Oklahoma.  Coffee’s law firm was also among the outside attorneys hired by former Attorney General Mike Hunter in the state’s lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors. Several law firms, working on a contingency basis, were awarded more than $120 million in fees from various settlements.   Since February 2025, Coffee has been the senior legal counsel for the Senate Republican caucus. He’s in the second year of an annual contract that pays him $150,000 per year, said Alex Gerszewski, spokesman for current Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle.  Cedar Lake Residents Question Delays At the July 21 Water Resources Board meeting, Cedar Lake residents wondered why it’s taken so long for the board to respond to the dam complaint. Dozens of them filled the meeting room, wearing stickers that read, “Save Cedar Lake. Vote No” and “Got Water? We Don’t.”  Don Hawkins, who’s lived at Cedar Lake since 2013, said water flowed over the Cedar Lake spillway regularly until the last few years. He said another upstream Coffee dam, No. 5, is also affecting Cedar Lake.  “They’re creating a stagnant lake by retaining water that they do not have rights to,” Hopkins told the board. “(Western Sportsmen Club) has had water rights to that surface since the ‘60s. How can you approve a dam to somebody who doesn’t even have the water rights? If they’re illegal dams, they’re illegal dams; it doesn’t matter when they were built. If you buy a property that has illegal dams on it, they don’t become legal again.”  George Corbyn, an attorney for the Coffee family companies, asked the board to approve the consent order. He said the Coffees have behaved responsibly since the issue came to their attention.  “They’re creating a stagnant lake by retaining water that they do not have rights to.”Don Hawkins, Cedar Lake resident “The Coffees and their experts have worked cooperatively with the Water Resources Board and their experts and their technical people and have come up with a plan in that dam safety consent order,” Corbyn said. “These dams are good dams. They’re solid dams. They’re well-constructed dams. We believe that.”  The board voted to go into executive session to discuss the consent order and cleared the meeting room. But reporters with Oklahoma Watch and Oklahoma Voice objected since no executive session was listed with that item on the meeting agenda. Officials scrapped the executive session and put off further action until the board’s September meeting.   In a July 24 written statement, the Water Resources Board said the Cedar Lake water levels and household water issues are being addressed by multiple divisions of the agency according to state law and regulations. It said no state agency regulates the production or water availability for domestic groundwater wells. However, the agency does require those wells to be drilled by licensed water well drillers.  “The Oklahoma Water Resources Board is working with the owners of the upstream dams to ensure that they comply with all applicable requirements under the Oklahoma Dam Safety Act,” said the written statement sent by agency spokeswoman Darla Whitley. “The owners of the upstream dams have agreed to a consent order which outlines the requirements needed to comply with board rules. The board has inspected all dams upstream of Cedar Lake and determined that none of the dams pose an immediate threat to public safety.”  The board said few options exist to help unincorporated communities such as Cedar Lake with funding or grants for water infrastructure.  “The board’s recommendations for the Cedar Lake community include establishing a rural water district for Cedar Lake, incorporating the community to make it eligible for financial support for a municipal water system, linking the community to a nearby rural water district, or obtaining expanded surface or groundwater rights to help improve lake levels,” the statement said. “None of these are going to be a ‘quick fix,’ but we are exploring all options and meeting regularly with attorneys for the community.”  Cedar Lake residents like Machacek said they’re tired of waiting for solutions and tired of worrying about what might happen to their lake and their dwindling water supplies.  “I haven’t worked 71 years – all my life – to have a lakefront property, just to watch it dry up,” Machacek told the board. “Love thy neighbor, but we’re not feeling too much love. His consent order is a joke. He’s thinking more about his catfish than he is about his community.” OWRB’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 15 at 9:30  a.m. Paul Monies has been a reporter with Oklahoma Watch since 2017 and covers state agencies and public health. Contact him at (571) 319-3289 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @pmonies.  The post Cedar Lake Residents Battle Powerful Neighbor Over Unpermitted Dams appeared first on Oklahoma Watch. ...read more read less