A decision by the Carbon County commissioners earlier this year proved a good choice for county residents looking to enjoy Mauch Chunk Lake over the Fourth of July holiday.

On Thursday, Commissioner Chris Lukasevich said that he thinks the decision to close the swimming area from July 1-4 to everyone except Carbon County and Coaldale residents, season passholders, campers and pavilion renters was well received.

“I think we’ve nailed our two objectives,” he said.

Goals were to ensure county residents get to utilize the lake and to help maintain the exceptional quality of the lake, which can be threatened during busy holiday weekends.

“We have to take proactive measures aggressively to ensure, and I always use this term, that we don’t become Beltzville,” Lukasevich said. “I think that we showed that we can protect it on these challenging weekends.”

He read a compliment the county received from a resident, who stated that this weekend was “one of the top handful of experiences there over the last few years.”

Most feedback was positive, the commissioners said.

Out of the four-day experiment, there was only one incident of an out-of-county resident being turned away from Beltzville and then again at Mauch Chunk Lake becoming irate and Jim Thorpe police needing to be called, the commissioners said.

One oversight, Lukasevich said was that he thinks the county should have better advertised that season passes were available for purchase in the park’s main office.

“I think that was one thing we could have done better,” he said. “We didn’t actively pursue that.”

Carbon County commissioners decided to test the waters by prioritizing county residents over the Fourth of July holiday in March after much discussion about changing access to the swimming area on weekends.