Frederickson: Clean-up of

impaired waters before lawmakers

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- While he can foresee only minimum changes in the 2003-2004 state budget, State Sen. Dennis Frederickson, a long-time environmentalist, predicts efforts to further clean up Minnesota's rivers, streams and lakes will take center stage during the 2004 Legislative session that starts two weeks from today.

"The governor is going to have a proposal on what is called impaired waters. In other words, evaluating water courses, rivers, streams (and lakes) in the state and addressing a way to remove impairments or to remove the sediment and pollution from them," the New Ulm Republican explained.

"That's a group that's been working since the end of last session, and I know that's going to be a big proposal. It's a part of the federal Clean Water Act of the early '70s which has been kind of overlooked."

Frederickson said the ad hoc committee, representing local governmental units, agriculture, environmentalists and state agencies, is charged with finding an acceptable way of monitoring and evaluating and then developing a strategy in each case for correcting impairments that are found in the water courses.

"The technical word for it is (determining) the TMDL (total maximum daily load) for an impaired water and (performing) an evaluation of whether or not the water in the streams meets (federal) clean water standards," Frederickson explained.

"Just as an example, if it was found that a stream was carrying excess phosphorus, they would try to determine the source of the phosphorus. They might not be able to identify a specific city or a specific run-off that is causing the problem," Frederickson continued.

"It could be that all of the land uses and all of the wastewater treatment systems in the watershed might meet regulations, but there's still too much phosphorus in the water. A team would try to evaluate where the phosphorus is coming from and then develop a strategy that might be implemented over several years to bring the phosphorus level in the water to within standards."

This could be a long-range process, Frederickson said, because it could take a number of years before there would be results from it. On water courses where there is a plan in place, the impaired-water proposal would supplement the existing plan, not replace it, Frederickson said.

"Unfortunately, no, there's not a lot of federal money available. Funding is one of the points of contention, yet, that the group is still working on, but I expect that bill will be in play fairly soon."

Frederickson also is the ranking Republican on the 20-member Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources which will soon begin work on a package of grants and allocations for environmental-related projects to be funded beginning July 1, 2005. The deadline for submission of requests is Feb. 20, 2004.

"I expect that this time we will have about $30 million to work with. I expect we will receive 400-500 requests this year, and typically, we will fund 70-100 proposals."