This summer’s drought and heat have bleached most of Lake Sacajawea’s emerald banks to a faded gold. And it’ll stay that way until the rains come.

The Longview parks department says budget cuts mean it doesn’t have the staff to turn on the manual sprinkler system.

“There used to be one person we had doing that all day long, every day,” Parks Superintendent Al George said.

However, the lake banks in the center of the park remain green because they’re regularly watered by the $85,000 automatic sprinkler system the city installed in two phases in 2006 and 2008.

That system runs on the Nichols Boulevard side of the lake from Washington Way to Louisiana Street. Along Kessler Boulevard, automatic sprinklers are buried from Washington Way to Hemlock Plaza.

The grass that lies beyond the reach of the new automated irrigation system normally is watered by sprinklers activated individually by hand.

Last fall, the Longview City Council slashed $100,000 from the parks budget to bridge a $2 million budget gap. As a result, the parks department had to cut all four seasonal parks positions.

So there’s no staff available to run the manual sprinkers, which cover the rest of the lake except for the north tip along Ocean Beach Highway. Water conservation isn’t an issue because the water used on the lawn is pumped out of the lake itself.

This is the brownest George has seen the park since the mid-1990s, when the park experienced irrigation problems.

“We’d like to have it green if we could,” he said Monday.

The manual sprinklers require inserting a coupler into each sprinkler head and running 10 sprinklers at a time for about half an hour. The number of sprinklers that can run at one time is limited by available water pressure. While those heads are spraying, the worker sets up the next section. Then the worker disconnects the first group of heads before activating the next section, George said.

“You just sort of leapfrog it down,” he said.

Summer is typically dry in Longview, but the city has had only a little more than an inch of rain since mid May. And last week it baked under its hottest spell in 28 years, and the heat blanched away whatever green was left in the grass except for deep-rooted weeds.

The drought is causing all the young trees the city planted over the last couple years to suffer, too. The parks department is scrambling to hand water them, but some trees are dying anyway, George said.

“We are having a difficult year,” he said.