An interview with District Administrator Terry Schwalbe

Q. The District has been in existence since March 1960, when it was one of the first in the nation, but do you suppose the average citizen here knows anything about it?

A. Well, I talk every day to technical people from the 12 municipalities in the District and three townships, as well as to many folks from the agencies like the Department of Natural Resources and the Corps of Engineers. Yet I’m sure that the average guy on the street knows very little about us.

Q. Could you tell the citizens, first of all, just what a watershed district is?

A. A watershed district is a special government entity, though it’s not a local unit of government, founded to manage the water resources of a particular watershed.

Q. So what, then, is a watershed?

A. Simply put, a watershed is all the area that drains into a body of water. In our case, it’s all the land, and the tributary streams, that drain into the Lower Minnesota River, from Carver to the confluence with the Mississippi River at Fort Snelling, a distance of about 38 miles.

Q. So a watershed district follows the water, not political boundaries?

A. That’s right. It’s a special kind of government management that follows natural not political contours. And in the case of the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District, our shape — and our mission — is unique. We follow the windings of the lower Minn from Carver and, at mile 14.7 in Savage, we’re responsible for assisting the Corps of Engineers in maintaining the 9-foot navigation channel that they built in 1966 as part of the Upper Mississippi River Waterways. Today one of our chief mandates is to help maintain this channel, keeping it open for grain and other barges.

Q. Do the residents of the District pay for this maintenance and other things the District does?

A. The only special levy the District has ever had was in 1965, at the start, when citizens were assessed a one-time fee for the commercial navigation improvements in the building of the 9-foot channel.

Today the District operates via an annual administrative levy of $250,000, which appears on residents’ tax bills under the “miscellaneous” heading. This fee has been the same from 1965 to today. The District gets other funds via grants and contributions from partners in the various projects we undertake.

Q. What else does the District do besides maintain the channel?

A. In the broadest sense, our mission is to maintain water quality in the District. To put it more concretely, our main concern is preserving and improving the quality of water in the Minnesota River and in its tributaries and the District’s wetlands. This is a critical mission, because we need to preserve these resources for succeeding generations, who should have the same wildlife abundance and flora and fauna diversity that we have now in the Minnesota River Valley.

This diversity is tremendous. You can see eagles nesting within 100 yards of an old landing light at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On our annual river tour, you can see bald eagles all over the place, wild turkey, deer, and fish. In the evening you can hear coyotes howling in the valley.

Q. If you’re not a local government unit, how do you get LGUs to manage these water resources according to your mandate?

A. We have what’s called a 509 plan, named after a section of the Minnesota statute that created watershed districts, and this plan gives our guidelines for protection of wetlands. These guidelines must comply with state and federal standards, and all cities must comply with ours. When we write a new 509 plan, which we do every 10 years, the local units of government must sign an agreement with us, pledging to regulate development and water resources according to our guidelines. They do this because it’s much easier to do without an additional layer of government and permitting for every project that gets built in a community, and without extra work for developers, land owners, and property owners. Cities have the closest links with these developers, so we let them manage development according to our guidelines and then audit to assure compliance. The system has worked well.

Q. Speaking of definitions again, what exactly is a wetland … and why are wetlands so important?

A. Back in the day, which wasn’t that long ago, we thought any body of water that you couldn’t put a motor on was a slough. These days, we’re more environmentally sensitive. We distinguish between environmental lakes, including wetlands, and recreational lakes. You might say offhand that a wetland is any slough or bog; but, more precisely, you could say it’s a place saturated with surface and or ground water that supports its own kind of plant and animal life. In the District, our resources include a rare and fragile kind of fen called a calcareous fen. Ground water here rises up through layers of calcium and magnesium bicarbonates and nourishes a unique ecosystem. We have one such fen in Chanhassen, called Seminary Fen, that is the subject now of a lively debate about the survivability of such resources. (See our 2001 article on Nicols Fen … and the article in this issue on the proposed Highway 41 river crossing bridge.)

Besides being places where diversity thrives, wetlands like trout streams are signs of how healthy our groundwater really is.

If the rare calcareous plants can’t survive in Seminary Fen, or trout can’t breed because Eagle Creek’s waters grow too warm or turbid from runoff or pollution, these are quick barometers to the health of our whole hydrology. (See the groundwater monitoring article in this issue.)

Q. What are some other examples of trout streams and fens in the District?

A. The Minnesota River Valley includes Seminary Fen in Carver County, which was, and still is, the subject of another highway crossing dispute; Boiling Springs, a place of spiritual significance to the Indian peoples, and Eagle Creek; Assumption Creek, which comes out of the Seminary Fen area, and which produced trout in the past; the Savage fens in Scott County; Nicols Fen in Burnsville and Eagan; Black Dog, Ft. Snelling, and Quarry Island fens downriver; Harnack Creek and Kinneally Creek, also in the Fort Snelling area; and three unnamed trout streams we’re very concerned about preserving.

Q. These are a wealth of resources! And I’ll bet the general public doesn’t know about them very much.

A. Unfortunately, that’s true. We have good evidence of it on our annual river tour, both last year's and this August's, where our guests, who might’ve grown up alongside the river, exclaim how exciting a river’s eye view is. They’ve spent their lives looking down on the river, literally and unfortunately emotionally too, but when they get on the river and look up they get spectacular views of the work the river has wrought in making a channel and making a habitat for such wildlife.

Q. Is this ignorance owing to simple unfamiliarity?

A. I think so. Unless you get down here and meet the river directly, it’s hard to appreciate it. Now, we may not yet have achieved the goals of Gov. Carlson’s challenge, which he issued in 1992, to make the river “swimmable and fishable” within 10 years, but we’ve made some progress.

You may not want to swim in the river just yet and probably don’t want to eat too many of the big fish you can catch there — especially if you’re pregnant —but the fishing on the river is fabulous — walleye, sturgeon, panfish in the backwaters. Trudge back there and try your hand at it. My friends fish off the sandbars just a cast away from my office here and pull in walleyes left and right while they watch eagles soar.

Q. Some citizens might be disgusted at the thought of swimming the Minnesota River.

A. I’m not advocating that people swim there now or, as I said, that they eat too many of the big fish you can pull out of there. But I do think we could all learn a lot from the river by getting down and meeting her face to face.

Of course, the river is commerce and recreation, fishing — and danger too, like floods, like the tragic drownings we have every year. But through all the danger and beauty and utility, we have to realize we’re all in this together. We can spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other, but what’s more important is the ability to get along and craft a plan to clean up the river for everyone.

Analysts can say that farmers dump phosphorus and a few other pollutants in the river, and it’s true. But we can say the same, still, of too many cities, and even the wastewater plants, which have come an awful long way in the past few decades in cleaning up their act.

Q. How are farmers doing in cleaning up their act?

A. For starters, they really liked the CREP incentives they received to introduce conservation measures on their land. And, then too, they’ve been getting a lot more environmentally conscious lately. They’ve switched to lower impact fertilizers. When they tile agricultural fields, they can increase yields say from 180 to 200 bushels an acre, but the side effects are more and faster runoff to the river, more erosion, less recharging through the soil of groundwater supplies. These groundwaters are our present and our children’s future. If we spoil them now, or dry them up, where are we? What kind of fix have we gotten ourselves into?

There’s been a lot of talk recently about disappearing wetlands in southern and western Minnesota; this is some of the greatest agricultural land on earth, but unless water is held back on the fields and in low spots, wildlife and people won't be able to enjoy the land. And we have all heard of the problems caused by too much runoff carrying too much silt and soil into Lake Pepin and of the huge dead zone, or hypoxia, in the Gulf of Mexico, an area of over 7,000 square miles now where nothing can grow.

Q. What about the city and the river?

A. We can also mention urban developers. In the metro area, we’re putting in more and more hard surfaces, so, as in the tiled farm fields, water runs off faster, and it carries chemicals and oils off parking lots. The District enforces best management practices that stipulate installation of holding ponds and other practices to filter water and retain it as long as possible so that it doesn’t storm down the slopes. These measures are working to some degree but are no real panacea.

Not all businesses and cities have money to maintain ponds and special structures. When the citizens and governments of Carver, Chaska, and Shakopee think about their towns, for example, they tend to think about the very historic downtowns, some of the oldest communities in the state, and when they’re developed, or redeveloped, if people have to choose between a water quality pond to protect the river smack in the downtown or preservation of their historic sites, economics tells them they’d better not put in the pond, so they do the best job they can with other types of treatment.

Q. So what is our answer to these problems? Can we solve them?

A. Everything goes back to water, which is what it’s all about. We’re fortunate to live in a state with more fresh water than anybody, with our ten or fifteen thousand lakes, our wetlands, our rivers and streams, and of course the great aquifers that we don’t see below us.

So one of my concerns with ag tiling — though my family is from a farming background and I grew up in Chaska when the population was just 3,000 — is, yes, getting better crops and much better yields on corn is a good in itself, but what is this doing to the future of the water table and our aquifers when the ground water is not getting down there, not soaking in. What are the next generations going to do?

To me water is the number one resource that we have in the world, because everybody needs water to live on, you can’t live without water, clean water, and we have some of the cleanest and we have to learn to conserve that. The public and private sectors are going through some big changes; state government has to deal with the issue of impaired waters and put into place various practices for dealing with them. These new practices will place additional fiscal pressure on all of us. It seems to me that the best way to solve these issues is to work jointly with other governmental agencies and the private sector and form partnerships so we don't duplicate solutions and costs.

Maybe there's a new consciousness on the part of consumer and government. Yes, dealing with water quality is not necessarily something we want to do. But we must learn to do what it takes to hand the world over to the next generation much as we received it.

* * *

To comment on or query us regarding this article, send an email now!