About LOLA

Letter from the President

The Lake Orion Lake Association (LOLA) was established in 1977 in an effort to promote communication between the residents and governmental agencies, and to preserve the beauty and quality of our lake. The LOLA Board is made of 11 volunteer lake residents elected at the annual LOLA general membership meeting typically held in June. We are all probably familiar with the typical LOLA activities including the installation, removal, and maintenance of the 17 No-Wake buoys on the lake, the annual Lighted Boat Parade supporting the Dragon on the Lake event, the ongoing weed management program, the water quality sampling performed during the season, and the annual LOLA donation to the Lake Orion Fireworks. But beyond the more visual activities we do, our Board agreed to focus on three primary areas this year: membership, communication, and lake overcrowding.

Membership
Our LOLA membership for the 2023 calendar year was 135. Although this may seem like a lot, it’s disappointing when you consider there are over 900 homes on the lake. We did several things this year to help drive membership including advertising in the Orion Review, increased use of social media, and our booth downtown during the Dragon on the Lake event. We feel membership and communication are very closely tied and confident our work to improve communication will help in our efforts to increase membership.

Communication
In an effort to better connect with our membership and the community, we have targeted several communication areas for focus this year. We have increased our presence on social media through the Orion Chat Room on Facebook. We have also been working to build an email list which we’ve used to distribute the new LOLA Newsletter. We put out two newsletters toward the end of 2023 and will continue in 2024. Topics for the newsletters have been split between LOLA activities and news of interest to our lake residents. We are also completing a total redesign of our LOLA website, which we plan to launch before the end of March 2024.

Lake Overcrowding
We have seen an increase in boat traffic on the lake in the past four to five years. The increased number of boats combined with varying levels of boating experience of our boat operators has become a concern for water/boating safety. This can be seen by boaters not following the counterclockwise flow, not observing no-wake areas, towing skiers and tubes outside legal hours or without a spotter, and not maintaining safe, legal distance between boats, docks, and the shoreline. We met with our local officials at the end of last season to brainstorm ideas to improve safety awareness and will be working jointly with the Oakland County Sheriff, the Lake Orion Village Police, and the DNR Conservation Officer to sponsor boater safety classes, post safety information at the DNR boat launch, and publish safety awareness information for the 2024 boating season.

To become a LOLA member, please visit our website Membership page. If you have questions, comments, or you would like to be added to our email list, click here to contact us.

George Dandalides
President, Lake Orion Lake Association