> News+Events > Features > Water - January 2010

Vermillion River corridor planning: a ‘balancing act’

Dakota County is leading what local officials characterize as a “pioneering approach” to protecting an important natural resource. The approach aims to integrate water quality, wildlife habitat, recreation, economic development and landowners’ rights.

The focus is the Vermillion River.

“This is a great balancing act,” said Al Singer, land conservation manager for Dakota County. “It is also an opportunity to engage the public in generating ideas and carrying them out. This can’t be a top-down process, it has to be inclusive as we move forward,” he said.

To that end, the county and its partners in December held the second of three rounds of public workshops about the river corridor. The goal is to:

• Create a collective vision for the corridor.
• Glean peoples’ preferences for development and conservation approaches.
• Propose an organizational structure to leverage the variety of resources that over time can help make the vision a reality.

A complex challenge, yet doable

The Vermillion River watershed – the largest in the seven-county metro area – drains 335 square miles in central Dakota and extreme southeastern Scott counties. The river winds through prime agricultural land, developing suburbs and developed cities. Several reaches of the river are designated trout streams.

But the river has some troubles. Elevated fecal coliform bacteria counts along the entire reach make the river unfit for drinking or swimming, according to Mary Jackson, senior planner for Dakota County. Excessive turbidity in some western stretches reduces fish populations. And as the human population of the watershed continues to grow rapidly, development spreads. This creates more heated and polluted stormwater runoff, and potentially even greater pollution issues.

Many agencies have jurisdiction in the corridor. For example, the Vermillion Watershed Joint Powers Organization (JPO) plans and carries out projects to protect water quality in the river. Local communities create zoning ordinances and stormwater management plans. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) oversees stocking and protection of the trout streams and wildlife management areas in the watershed.

The Metropolitan Council owns about 460 acres of property on both sides of the Vermillion at the site of the Empire Wastewater Treatment Plant in Empire Township. For its first 30 years, the small plant discharged treated wastewater into the Vermillion. But concerns about local population growth and the concurrent increase in wastewater volume led the Council to build a 12-mile pipe to the Mississippi River where, since March 2008, effluent is discharged.

According to Singer, several elements combine to make the corridor-wide planning effort a potential model for the rest of the region and the state. It presents an opportunity to:

• Thoughtfully integrate water quality, wildlife habitat, recreation and economic development considerations.
• Create a “laboratory” for combining and leveraging a variety of funding sources.
• Create partnerships with the private sector.
• Demonstrate ways to work cooperatively with private landowners.

“We have the opportunity to protect an entire river system,” Singer said. “It is small enough, even in its complexity, that we can do something really positive.”

LCCMR provides seed funding

The Vermillion River Corridor Plan has its origins in the DNR’s Metro Conservation Corridor program, Singer said. The river is the focal point of one of 14 designated conservation corridors in the region. Singer, a former DNR planner, was convinced that developing a river corridor plan could be a model for how conservation could be implemented in a more holistic way.

The county applied to the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, which granted the project $510,000 for planning and initial implementation. The JPO kicked in $40,000 and Active Living Dakota County provided $15,000 to help promote increased, healthy recreation opportunities in portions of the corridor.

County engages citizens to develop the plan

A major partner in the county’s efforts is the nonprofit Friends of the Mississippi River. FMR runs the Vermillion Stewards Program, which engages local citizens in activities that protect the river and its tributaries. The county hired FMR to encourage and assist public participation in development of the corridor plan.

In summer 2009, citizens from throughout the corridor were invited to one of five workshops that each focused on a particular portion of the corridor, based on similar land-use patterns. Staff presented key findings from local watershed studies and projects. Working in small groups, participants reviewed a series of images depicting approaches for enhancing water quality, habitat, recreation, and future development, as they might look in each of the corridor’s predominant land uses (agriculture, residential, open space, and commercial). Participants selected their most and least preferred approaches for planning consideration.

Approaches to protecting habitat and water quality were generally preferred over approaches related to recreation and economic development, Singer said. Participants in all the workshops chose perennial agricultural buffers as one of their top five approaches. The importance of private property rights also came to the fore.

Singer assured residents that the plan is “an evolving process” and that the county will continue to work with private property owners on conservation efforts. “Participation is voluntary,” he said. “We will not be condemning private land.” 

At a second round of public workshops in December, participants reviewed and refined draft concepts for the full corridor and reviewed implementation ideas.

“The quality of public participation has been really good,” said Trevor Russell, FMR’s watershed program director. “With so many demands placed on such a fragile natural resource, we’ve been lucky to have dedicated local residents helping this project find the right balance. The input we have received from community members has been invaluable in shaping a shared vision for the future of the river.”

Dakota County Commissioner Joe Harris concurred. He said that getting broad public buy-in to the plan will likely take time, as will implementing the plan. “We’re not going to be able to spend enough money overnight to correct the mistakes that have been made over the last 150 years,” he said.

Next step: a draft plan and governance structure

The county is now developing the draft plan for the corridor, which it will bring to the public for review in March 2010.

The big remaining challenge is coming up with an organizational structure that can coordinate all the aspects of implementation, Singer said. This could include regulatory responsibility, funding, and balancing the different values and interests in the corridor. One of several possibilities being explored, he said, would be to expand the existing watershed joint powers board to include additional representation from cities, townships, landowners, business and citizens, bringing “more voices to the decision table.”

“We want to make sure that there is better coordination between all of the interests that affect the river corridor and that funding sources are being used wisely to provide multiple public benefits,” Singer said.

Once the plan is complete, the county will bring it to all the jurisdictional entities that touch the corridor – many of which have been involved in the planning process – and essentially ask them to ratify it, Singer said. After that, the next step will be to implement the governance structure.

The plan will feed into Dakota County’s initiative to develop a county-wide comprehensive land conservation vision and framework in 2010.