Minnesota River watershed district celebrates 60th year

As 2020 began winding down in early December, the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District began celebrating its 60th Anniversary. The party favor for folks from Carver to Eden Prairie and Mendota is a 12-minute video with spectacular aerial and still photography of the river woven together with informed perspectives on the history, mission and and future of this low profile environmental agency.

“They’ve come a long way since 1960,” says Ron Harnack in the video. The water resources consultant applauds the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District (LMRWD) for engaging a range of industries, businesses, agencies and citizens to improve water quality, control flooding and to keep the river’s navigation channel open.

District board member Jesse Hartman cites other additional priorities: “There are certain parts of the ecosystem here that are very fragile and those are the ones that we have to protect.” “There are other parts that are designated for recreation …. There’s hunting, there’s fishing, there’s canoeing and then mountain biking.”

As 2020 began winding down in early December, the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District began celebrating its 60th Anniversary. The party favor for folks from Carver to Eden Prairie and Mendota is a 12-minute video with spectacular aerial and still photography of the river woven together with informed perspectives on the history, mission and and future of this low profile environmental agency.
“They’ve come a long way since 1960,” says Ron Harnack. The water resources consultant applauds the Lower Minnesota River District (LMRWD) for engaging a range of industries, businesses, agencies and citizens to improve water quality, control flooding and keeping the river’s navigation channel open.
District board member Jesse Hartman cites other additional priorities: “There are certain parts of the ecosystem here that are very fragile and those are the ones that we have to protect. There are other parts that are designated for recreation…. There’s hunting, there’s fishing, there’s canoeing and then mountain biking.”

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“I want to celebrate the fact that we’re sixty years old,” says LMRWD Administrator Linda Loomis. “We’re still doing our mission and we’re continuing to evolve and manage the new environments that we’re seeing because of climate change and land use changes.”

The video beautifully frames the scenic and recreational amenities and industries from Carver to the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. The vistas of the flood plain lakes from Flying Cloud Drive and the trails in the Richard T. Anderson and Prairie Bluff Conservation Areas lie within the district’s jurisdictional boundary; so too the neighborhoods south of Flying Cloud Airport and Riverview Road.

In Shakopee, the Lower Minnesota Watershed District includes ValleyFair, Canterbury Park, the massive Amazon.com warehouse, burgeoning office parks and subdivisions and the Blue Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant. The Met Council facility processes sanitary sewage from Eden Prairie and 30 other towns discharging up to 32 million gallons of clean water daily into the Minnesota River.

The treated sewage from Eden Prairie kitchens and toilets ends up, ironically, freshening a river that is cited as one of the nation’s most degraded; owing mostly to up stream agricultural runoff and silt from the Minnesota’s vast watershed which amounts to one third of the state’s total area.

But the good news about the lower reach of the Minnesota River is that the LMRWD continues to have a critical role in stewarding some remarkable natural and recreational resources that share geography with industry and suburban neighborhoods. For example the agency partners with The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to improve habitats in the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, the largest such metro refuge in the country.

The LMRWD also works with the MN DNR and local municipalities to protect a few trout streams and cold water, calcareous fens, among the nation’s rarest ecosystems.

The Lower Minnesota River Watershed District was created by the State in 1960 to be the local governing entity that works with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the river’s navigation channel. The tugboat barges that navigate the 9-foot deep channel between the Mississippi River and terminals in Burnsville and Savage carry some 2 million tons of grains, sand, gravel and salt each year.

The Ports of Savage terminals ship an estimated 6 percent of the nation’s grain. The trucks that line-up on the north side of Highway 13 in Savage unload soybeans, corn, oats, rye and wheat onto barges that travel down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and beyond.

“The dredging pretty much has to be pretty much ongoing to keep the slips open to the ports,” says Freshwater policy director Carrie Jennings in the video. The dredged silt material is moved to a 20-acre site in Savage that is owned and managed by the watershed district. Once the dredged material dries, it is marketed as clean construction fill and assigned for other uses.

A future with heavier and more frequent rains

Climate change and weather patterns have affected the entire world and are rising even higher on our local urgent-action-needed calendars. Over the past eight years, rain gushers and saturated soils left giant sinkholes on Duluth streets; caused a Lilydale landslide that buried and killed two school children; started a Minneapolis mudslide that cost millions of dollars and destroyed two houses high above Purgatory Creek.

Most of the land above and behind the steep bluffs in Bloomington and Eden Prairie within the LMRWD’s jurisdiction has been developed. ”The greatest concern for the District within … Eden Prairie,” writes District Administrator, Linda Loomis in an email letter, “is the steep slopes.” Loomis anticipates that heavier and more frequent rainfalls will cause more erosion and steep slope “failure.”

Loomis cites a recent University of Minnesota study commissioned by Hennepin County that documents more than 600 “historic slope failures” in the county along just the Minnesota River.  “The District,” Loomis says, “is concerned with the threat [slope]failures pose to public safety and also to sedimentation in the river.”

The short anniversary video, however, is a celebration of the District’s steady service for what it calls “The unsung work horse of Minnesota’s waterways.” The video is now playing several times a week on Southwest Community Television’s Channel 15 and is streamed on the District’s website here.