Seminary Fen to be crossed?

A new Environmental Impact Study (EIS) launched this summer by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is examining alternate routes for a proposed new Highway 41 river crossing bridge through Chaska. 

But if this new bridge doesn’t get build in five or 10 years, or even 20, don’t be surprised. One of the last such major river bridge proposed by MnDOT, for Highway 27 in Savage, some 27 years ago, has still not been built.

In both cases, the highways ended at a point from which they could be extended, most straightforwardly, through rare calcareous fens — Savage Fen in Savage and Seminary Fen in Chaska, 90 acres of a 500-acre wetland complex. Twenty or thirty years ago when road extensions were planned, neither the public nor the DOT gave much thought to fens and wetlands. Today, public consciousness of these resources is heightened, but nature continues to vie with human self-interest.

The new crossing over Highway 41 is planned to relieve traffic congestion in the southwest metro, both from the Bloomington Ferry Bridge and I-35W. But because Chaska doesn’t want the new stretch of freeway to roar through its historic downtown and business center, the city council has recommended one of the six routes being studied for the crossing that leads directly over Seminary Fen.

The need for another crossing

Bill Monk, Chaska city engineer, suggests that Highway 41 now accommodates over 20,000 trips a day, and projections make that 30,000 to 35,000 trips within the next 20 years. When the new freeway 212 is finished in 2008, there will be more pressure on existing Highway 41; thus, the DOT proposes to lengthen Highway 41 by three miles to connect trunk highways 212 and 169.

At this time, Chaska is just one party to the DOT’s environmental study. Besides Chaska and Chanhassen, other contributors to the report include the District; the cities of Shakopee and Carver; the townships of Jackson and Louisville; and agencies like the DNR, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service. Under MnDOT’s aegis, many meetings are being held in the Chaska area to solicit ideas from these parties and others.

This EIS report should be finished within two years — not without controversy, and many earnest heads and hearts working together. To date, spirited but genial collaboration seems the rule of the day.

Jeanette Leete, for example, a DNR fen specialist, gives credit to the DOT for “putting money into the study of the fen itself, and we are seeing quite a bit of respect from their staff and willingness to do as good as job as possible in figuring out what the fen is and its value.”

The need to save the fen

Of course, Leete is the kind of advocate who will fight to the end to save such wildness. When she took her boss out to the fen one day, he said (just kidding, but sounding like a lot of people), “This is just a bunch of weeds!” She understands how people might not see much in the fens, but then they wouldn’t know the rareness of the resource unless they’d get down there in the spring when it’s full of ladyslippers. Or take a course in weeds and wildness from someone just like her.

A fen, after all, is not just weed or waste. It’s a measure of the environmental health of an area — both for plants and animals, including man. The cold, clear water of such fens, which wells up and seeps over the terrain, is often associated with trout streams (in the case of Seminary Fen, this would be Assumption Creek).

The DNR also suggests that "fens have a wide range of functions. They control floods, filter pollutants from water, sustain biodiversity, provide plant and animal habitats, augment water flow, and even store carbon in their peaty soil."

Fens have been protected, since 1991, by the state’s Wetland Conservation Act, which according to the Board of Water and Soil Resources recognizes the following benefits that such structures provide:

• Water quality, including filtering pollutants out of surface water and groundwater, using nutrients that would otherwise pollute public waters, trapping sediments, protecting shoreline, and recharging groundwater supplies;
• Floodwater and storm water retention, including reducing the potential for flooding in the watershed;
• Public recreation and education, including hunting and fishing areas, wildlife viewing areas, and nature areas;   
• Commercial benefits, including wild rice and cranberry growing areas and aquaculture areas;
• Fish and wildlife benefits; and
• Low-flow augmentation during times of drought

Scientist Rick Brasch, of Bonestroo Engineering, whose firm is now canvassing the District's groundwater resources, assures us that both fens and trout streams are strongly protected by state statutes. He “can’t imagine the hassle someone would have to go through to build a highway through a calcareous fen, cutting off hydrology to the fen or altering its physical layout.” But it’s not just the fen Brasch would worry about — it’s Assumption Creek, too, a trout stream that rises from the fen and depends on it for the clear, cool waters that sustain the trout.

Spurred on by the inroads of development and traffic, the District has joined a new study group — which includes among many parties the DNR, the city of Chaska, the U.S. Geological Survey, MnDOT, and the USDA Forest Service — that meets quarterly to consider the twin fates of Seminary Fen and Assumption Creek — two natural formations with a hint of supernatural suggestion in their names.

The DNR naturalist Leete is one of those rare breeds who will not just be passing over the river, crossing hurriedly en route to something better. She’s in her element, after all, when she’s in the river bottom and the fens. She’d like to take us by the hand, however reluctant, and show us patiently what the fen is made of, including rare plants like twig rush, marsh arrow grass, and sterile sedge.

At the moment, Leete says, she’s sanguine about the outcome of the struggle over Highway 41. After all, “the state legislature has gained enough understanding to realize that because of the rarity of fens and species and loss of a lot of peat on the banks of the Minnesota River, this is something they need to protect.”

Michele Hanson, another DNR employee, whose job it is to get all EIS parties to the table, suggests that Seminary Fen is “a really significant resource in Minnesota, probably in the top ten percent of such sites in the nation in terms of the quality of the remaining plant community.”

"Peatlands that receive water both from precipitation and ground water, which has percolated through mineral soil, are classified as fens." — Minnesota DNR. Click here or on illustration for fuller discussion of the fen climate.

Hard choices coming

The choice of where to build the new highway crossing is not an easy one, of course, from the point of view of city leaders. The Chaska City Council looked at four main crossing proposals, as shown in the figure above — the first route leading down Main Street, says Mayor Gary Van Eyll, which “we weren’t in favor of any more than the route leading down County Road 17, which would have taken out quite a few houses and old downtown businesses.”

None of the proposed crossings is ideal, but whatever crossing is finally approved, says van Eyll, “there can’t be a crossing without an environmental impact, for one way or the other, every crossing is going to affect, some way, the river, the watershed, DNR and US Fish and Wildlife areas. I don’t know if any route could have zero impact.”

Stay tuned to the News for further word on MnDOT’s EIS — and what implications it might have for future river crossings.

* * *

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