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All images and underlined text are links to further information. Click here to survey a photo album of dredging operations or on the picture below.

1. A backhoe unloads dredge materials from a barge at the Edward Kraemer site on the lower Minnesota River.

2. Rivers and Harbors Acts through the years authorize river dredging.

3. A chart of commercial terminals on the river.

4. Origins of the District, as spelled out in 1999 District plan.

5. Economic impact of barge traffic on the lower Minn.

the district's perspective:
we have our roots in dredging

Current Scott County manager and engineer from 1960 through 2002, Larry Samstad, recalls how the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District (LMRWD) began as a response to a federal directive for river channel maintenance.

In 1960 the second district in the state and nation, the LMRWD was set up as a self-governing, independent entity to help control water resources for commercial, esthetic, natural, and recreational purposes.

In order for the Corps to acquire jurisdictional authority over the LMRWD — and not to have to go separately to “five different counties,” says Samstad, “and 17 different municipalities” — it needed a sponsor like the District that would be responsible for “streamlining the Corps’ acquisition of land rights.”

To create the nine-foot channel, the Corps had to acquire private river bottom property from two reluctant private owners and straighten three big bends in that property under the present 494 bridge. After that, it was responsible for dredging the main channel to a nine-foot depth and developing sites for depositing the dredge materials

Channel maintenance was a fairly uncomplicated affair in the early days of the District, but the original main site, on the north shore of the river in Bloomington, was put out of commission by a couple of forces — one developmental, the other environmental.

The city of Bloomington was developing rapidly and needed the land where the dredge materials were being deposited. And the environmental movement was expanding, too, all across the nation, and making the work of the COE more difficult … and more responsive to the citizens’ will.

In 1974, for example, the Great River Environmental Action Team (GREAT) was formed as a “broad-based, federal-state task force organized to develop a coordinated and balanced plan for managing the resources of the upper Mississippi River valley.” GREAT was concerned, among other things, with the way that the COE had been managing dredge site materials. 

To this point, the Corps had been placing material along river shorelines, which other resource agencies believed was threatening native flora and fauna. The GREAT Study also made recommendations for tributary rivers authorized by the COE, such as the Minnesota and St. Croix. GREAT’s concerns naturally filtered down to other groups concerned with other rivers, including the Minnesota.

In an age of greater population and development, on the one hand, and greater environmental awareness, on the other, the local COE was forced to go more slowly and deliberately.

Since the late 1970s the COE has been depositing materials dredged from certain sites near Savage at Edward Kraemer and Sons on the river, at 35W. A self-described “diverse general contractor and construction-aggregates supplier,” Kraemer sells the dredge materials to contractors for fill and other beneficial uses. However, for the past decade at least, the site has not been adequate to handle all dredged materials, including private channel dredgings, and so the District has been searching for suitable additional dredge material sites.

This process is long and complex, requiring delegate negotiations with both private and public land owners. When negotiations are concluded, you’ll hear about the results in these pages.