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FAIRMONT - At the Fairmont Lakes Foundation's annual meeting on Thursday, experts discussed funding for watershed districts, what has worked and what can happen in the future.
Opening the discussion was Shell Rock River Watershed District Administrator Andy Henschel. The watershed includes Albert Lea's chain of lakes and Henschel said it has been a success since being founded in 2003.
"We’re able to not only work on actual in-lake projects, but we work with farmers on projects outside of the city," he said. "We’re also able to work with the city on projects. It’s a very unique organization that can cover multiple areas within the county or within the district. We cover roughly 246 square miles just within Freeborn County."
The big projects they are working on include dredging Fountain Lake, storing floodwater and now they are restoring the channel between Fountain and Albert Lea lakes with funding from the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Fund.
Shell Rock River Watershed District Program and Project Manager Courtney Phillips said before the dredging, they sought to tackle a lot of projects upstream to prevent additional phosphorous coming in.
"We spent multi-million dollars upstream," she said. "As long as we were up there, we were doing some pretty cool, fun things."
This included an in-lake habitat, utilizing changes to better the structure and vegetation for the fish and other organisms in the ecosystem.
"We took the areas of the lake that we had conducted dredging on," Phillips said. "We placed sand at the bottom so we were providing a stable substrate for the rock to be placed on, and then we were placing rock in the lake. We placed large boulders in with the aeration unit to be able to provide better fishing habitat."
This has worked well enough that they plan to do similar habitat projects for the rest of the lake, but they have to complete the dredging project first.
Since 2005, the watershed has also utilized an Albert Lea Local Option Sales Tax, which raised $15 million by 2013, two years before its end date. It received enough support for a renewal.
"We went back to the citizens and said, 'This is what we’ve done. Do you like what we’re doing? We would like to renew the sales tax,'" Henschel said. "The local option sales tax passed for a second time, and that one was for $15 million or 15 years, whichever came first."
That one expired this year, and even though both votes passed with over 80 percent approval, the legislature denied a request for the city to hold another vote to renew the LOST funds, so they will continue to appeal to the legislature.
"It’s crazy to me that you have to ask them to have your local citizens to vote for a sales tax that they supported the first time at 87 percent approval rating for the first vote, and the second vote it approved by 84 percent," Henschel said.
Between the Outdoor Heritage Fund, Legislative-Citizen Commission, and other grants received since 2003, they have received $86 million toward projects protecting the quality of the lakes and projects involving and surrounding the lakes.
"Couldn’t have done that without the local option sales tax because that’s what helps us leverage the cost share piece," Henschel said. "Same with the bonding dollars. The first dredge project, the state asked us, 'We want you to have some skin in the game.' We said okay, we’ll put $9.5 million, and you give us an additional $7.5 million. We couldn’t have done that without the local option sales tax."
Currently, Fairmont is a part of the Blue Earth River Watershed District, which extends through Blue Earth County and into Freeborn and Kossuth Counties. All of the counties included in the watershed share one plan, instead of each county having its own separate plan.
Minnesota Watersheds Executive Director Jan Voit was the last speaker, and opened with how new watershed districts can be established.
"You would need a steering committee," she said. "That should include local leaders who are people who are well known and respected in the community, who would like to work to build an understanding of the need for a watershed district. It’s important to include meetings with your county commissioners so that they are on board, that they understand what it is that you want to do, because you will, as a watershed district, have tax authority."
On top of this, Voit said work would need to be done with the county auditors on how taxes would work. After all of that is finalized, a petition would need to be sent to the Board of Water and Soil Resources.
"If the Board of Water and Soil Resources determines that the petition has the required number of signatures, which I believe you need the County Commissioners to sign on," Voit said. "You need 50 resident landowners to sign on the petition, and then once that petition is accepted by the Board of Water and Soil Resources, they would hold a hearing within 35 days, and it would be held in the watershed district. If they determine you have met all of the criteria, they would order the establishment of the watershed district, and they would appoint the first board. A board of managers can be three members to nine."
When the meeting opened to public comment at the end, Fairmont City Councilor Britney Kawecki said Fairmont does not have a voice in their watershed's Greater Blue Earth River Basin Alliance because they voted not to pay dues into GBERBA.
"There’s a county commissioner on the board, but they went back to open up the bylaws, they took a vote on it, and they voted not to," Kawecki said.
"It’s very unlikely then that One Watershed, One Plan funds are getting spent in your area, I’m assuming," Phillips said.
"They said that the Chain of Lakes has such a huge water resource that hopefully we would get funding because we have the water area," Kawecki said. "We will see."
Around 40 people were in attendance at the meeting, which took place inside the Southern Minnesota Educational Campus (SMEC) building. Chairman Jon Omvig also presented on what the Fairmont Lakes Foundation does, such as the kayaking program and their Keep the Trash Out campaign.