LAKE DELTON, Wis. -- Officials from the village of Lake Delton are responding in “disappointment” after some former lakeside property owners filed a notice of claim against the village, its board and some of its employees.

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The notice, filed on Wednesday, is the first legal step toward suing the village for property losses incurred in the June 9 draining of Lake Delton. The man-made lake emptied when a shoreline breach swallowed up nine lakeside lots and five homes and cut a new channel across a county highway through to the Wisconsin River.

Village attorney Dick Cross said that the village will look at the 15-page "Notice of Circumstances of Claim" at the board meeting on Monday night in closed session but take no action. He said the board has four months to accept, reject or take no action on the notice.

If the board takes no action, the claimants can move forward with the process of filing of lawsuit. The parties involved have said they will do that, WISC-TV reported.

Cross said that the village has more than enough insurance to cover the claims, which he believes are capped under state law at $50,000 per person. However, he said that the village did nothing wrong and that there is no case law he knows of to support the property owners' allegations.

The designated spokesman for the village board said he's "disappointed" some are pursuing a claim for money and denies allegations the village could have prevented the draining of Lake Delton, WISC-TV reported.

"To say that someone deliberately was negligent and caused this is I think a little ridiculous," said Tom Diehl, the owner of the Tommy Bartlett show and the designated spokesman for the village board. "I mean our business here probably suffered more than anyone's business -- pretty hard to have a water-ski show when you don't have any water, so I have as much invested in this lake as anyone else."

Diehl said he's not trying to minimize the losses property owners in the breach suffered, but he said they got paid the equalized value of their land and homes by the state so it could rebuild a highway.

Diehl said he sees no way the village will accept the claim, WISC-TV reported.

"I don't believe we mismanaged anything. I think given the circumstances, we did everything humanly possible to secure the dam so we didn't have a dam failure and that's what we were focusing our attention on," said Diehl.

Eight families with lakeside lots and homes are pursuing compensation for their losses, including personal possessions, from the village of Lake Delton. They allege in the notice that the village was negligent in its maintenance and operation of the lake dam, which didn't fail during severe storms the weekend of June 5 through June 9. The owners said that the village was legally obligated to be able to handle a 1,000-year flood but wasn't because its floodgates and spillways weren't operating properly.

They also assert the village officials knew a breach was possible at their shoreline and did nothing to try to stop it, WISC-TV reported.

The victims' notice alleges the village could have stopped the disaster, though. They believe a concrete seawall in front of their homes should have been sandbagged instead of the village dam, WISC-TV reported.

Kim Grimmer, the property owners' attorney, said that the owners had their land "taken" from the village unconstitutionally and without fair compensation and so the state caps don't apply.

Some of the homeowners said that they don't want pain and suffering payments only money to cover 100 percent of their losses. They said that state Department of Transportation payments to them didn't do that.

Cross said that the village has concerns the owners have already been paid through the state DOT and possibly the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The lot owners' claim also alleges the village was negligent because the dam gates only went up 4 feet instead of the 6 and that limited the flow of water that could have been discharged.

The state engineer that regulates the dam said he measured the dam's capacity to handle a thousand year flood based on gates that were 4 by 6, not 4 by 4, WISC-TV reported.