Star Tribune
City, Park Board and Minnehaha Watershed District launching new partnership to repair water problems in south Minneapolis, clean up Lake Hiawatha
Minnehaha Creek has long been treated like a glorified drainage ditch as it flows downstream from Lake Minnetonka through south Minneapolis, dumping street runoff into the Mississippi River. A new partnership seeks to redefine the creek’s relationship with the people who live along its banks and play in the lakes fed by its polluted water.
Modeled after the 1991 Clean Water Partnership that introduced water quality monitoring to the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes, the new agreement brings together the city of Minneapolis, Park Board and Minnehaha Creek Watershed District. It proposes engineering curves back into the artificially straightened Minnehaha Creek, and three stormwater treatment projects targeted at the densest underground pipe systems in south Minneapolis.
The ultimate agenda: clean up Lake Hiawatha and pull it off the state’s impaired waters list, where it has languished for 22 years.
“We’ve experienced the extremes of drought and flooding and we know that they are getting more extreme,” said James Wisker, district administrator of the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District. “It’s taxed our infrastructure and damaged our natural systems. It’s also brought attention to old land use decisions that are still impacting us today, like the historic filling of our region’s wetlands to make way for growth and development.”
Residents have expressed concerns about the sustainability of the city’s residential and recreational environment. Water problems have increasingly interfered with the quality of life in south Minneapolis, with basements flooding when it storms and high levels of E. coli cutting beach season short.
The Minnehaha Creek watershed covers 178 square miles of the metro, encompassing 29 communities of Hennepin and Carver counties and 120 lakes and streams including Lake Minnetonka. Everyone who lives in the watershed pays taxes to the watershed district, which is responsible for managing the water’s health.
The biggest obstacle to the district’s work is their inability to control what happens on land. Nevertheless, litter, dirty runoff and the loss of land to development affect water. So over the past decade, the watershed district spent heavily on co-developing new parks, nature preserves and even housing complexes with stormwater treatment features in Edina, St. Louis Park and Hopkins.
Those efforts have reduced pollutants that flow down toward Minneapolis, but to date none of the projects have actually been located along the city’s segment of the creek. A earlier memorandum of understanding between the city, Park Board and watershed district, signed in 2018, expired last year without any work being done. This year’s new agreement recommits the agencies to addressing the city’s water problems together.
“We’re going to continue to work together in perpetuity, no matter who is in the roles that we all are filling right now, to continue to work to improve water quality and the entire Chain of Lakes and the creek corridor until there isn’t anything left to do, because that’s what we need to do,” said Park Board Commissioner Steffanie Musich, who has long advocated for improving the water quality of Minnehaha Creek.
Why Lake Hiawatha
The partnership is using Lake Hiawatha as a barometer of progress because it’s the last lake in the Minnehaha Creek watershed before its waters flow into the Mississippi River.When there’s water in the creek, it flushes Hiawatha’s system, and bacteria concentrations in the lake could either increase or decrease based on the creek’s water quality, according to the Park Board’s latest water resources report. There are also seven stormwater outfalls surrounding the lake.
Despite all the efforts to improve water quality upstream, in 2022, Hiawatha Beach closed for nearly two months due to excess E. coli. Over the past 10 years it has tallied the highest number of closures of all Park Board beaches. Hiawatha also is the only Minneapolis lake where zebra mussels have been detected on sampling plates, according to the Park Board’s aquatic invasive species report, which blames the infestation on Lake Minnetonka via Minnehaha Creek.
Friends of Lake Hiawatha, a neighborhood group focused on repairing the wildlife habitat around Lake Hiawatha, has been pulling plastic litter out of its lakeshore grasses for years. The group is advocating for trash to be included as one of the pollutants measured and monitored by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. The city now lists trash as a pollutant of concern.
There are other serious water issues in the vicinity. Residential yards and basements around Solomon Park and Lake Nokomis would flood badly in wet years, and neighbors’ demand for answers eventually led to an investigation of historical records showing how filling wetlands in the Minnehaha Creek floodplain in the 1910s created neighborhoods perched atop water-retaining peat deposits.
Convening community meetings about that discovery was one of the first things Emily Koski did as a new City Council member in 2022. How the wetland management of past decades is becoming relevant again in a period of climate instability has been on her mind ever since, she said.
“It’s been amazing that they’ve done all this work upstream, which does help Minneapolis and it does help Lake Hiawatha, but targeting near us will be really beneficial, to make sure we’re doing the most that we can to support climate change [resilience] in the areas that we see all the time,” said Koski.
First phase projects
Minnehaha Creek dips around a set of tennis courts at 52nd and Morgan Avenue S. and trickles beneath an idyllic wooden bridge. One of the most obvious signs of impairment here is a crumbling concrete spillway that shoots stormwater runoff straight into the creek. Another is along the creek’s edge, where years of water rushing down has scoured away the bank, and tall trees have begun to lean for lack of a solid anchor. Excess sediment dumped into the creek here travels down to Lake Hiawatha, said Michael Hayman, the watershed district’s director of project planning.
The stretch of the creek between Penn and Morgan avenues is one of three focus areas comprising the first phase of the creek restoration partnership. It will include replacing the concrete spillway with some kind of cascading rain garden. New wetlands and curving of the creek are also planned for Nicollet Hollow, where the creek forms a bowl around a cluster of houses before it hits Nicollet Avenue, and at Cedar Avenue just upstream of Lake Nokomis.
The spots were chosen because they are where the densest system of pipes drains directly to the creek, said Hayman, so installing stormwater management features here would theoretically have the greatest impact on downstream waters. If these projects are constructed along with other efforts, like keeping yard waste out of drains, the state could take Lake Hiawatha off its roster of impaired waters within the next decade, he said.
“There’s two times when people are always thinking about the creek. Number one when the creek is flooding, number two when all of a sudden there is no creek, it’s just a dry walkway full of rocks,” said Jonathan Heide, who lives a few blocks away from the creek in the Field neighborhood and often runs along its banks. During the height of the pandemic, he ran the creek’s north bank all the way up to Gray’s Bay Dam at Lake Minnetonka, then back down its south bank to Minnehaha Falls. It took him several days to piece it all together, but along the way he got to see bridges and golf courses, parts where the creek had been used like a parking lot runoff dump, and segments that had been restored to a natural arabesque.
“It really was a lesson in urban planning. Some places the creek was an afterthought. Nobody knew it was there and they just walled it off with a big warehouse. Then in other places, it was center stage. It was like a welcome mat for everybody in the neighborhood,” Heide said. “So I’m excited to see more changes happen for the water quality overall.”
The city signed on to the partnership this month. Once the Park Board and watershed district also ratify it, feasibility studies will begin on the first three projects, which will define costs.
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
