The St. Croix River is a national Wild and Scenic River. The river continues to see a decline in water quality due to elevated nutrient levels. Erosion of gullies along the river contribute large amounts of sediment and nutrients to the river.
This first year of the project will collect available data relevant to the TMDL development, determine the data sets best suited for the TMDL development. Gain a better understanding of the watershed and impaired lakes, and assessment of all potential sources (internal and external) of the causes of lake impairment. EOR will also review the data produced by the MPCA for the impairment assessment for each of the lakes during year 1 of the project.
This project willl complete a final TMDL document that will be submitted to EPA for approval. Document will include Lake Osakis, Clifford Lake, Faille Lake, and Smith Lake impairments. A final technical memorandum describing the elements of the model framework and any deviations from the recommended construction methodology will be also be provided with the submission of the watershed models.
Chisago County will coordinate up to three community dialogue meetings to inform its water planning decisions. The goal of the meetings will be to provide safe, productive and effective venues for citizens to become authentically engaged in the water planning process. The outcome of this Civic engagement work with Chisago County and their county water planning process will be a more engaged public in the County Water Planning Process.
This project will support a civic engagement cohort that will be offered in southwest Minnesota to foster partnering and build capacity of local government, organizations, and residents for effective civic engagement in water protection and restoration. This project will also build networks and the skill set of local resource professionals to do effective civic engagement work for water restoration and protection. The cohort will be administered through the Minnesota River Board (MRB), established in 1995 with a goal of focusing water management efforts on the local level.
This project will support the necessary activities for improving the water quality and biological community by reducing nutrients, sediment levels and managing in-stream habitat within the Goose Creek 10-digit HUC Watershed. This restoration and protection plan will identify pollutant load reduction estimates and management strategies that will be used to obtain the TMDL goals outlined in the plan.
This project will complete a comprehensive study, following a rational, step-wise process of data analysis, response modeling and comparison to the water quality standards, followed by impairment diagnosis, modeling of improvement and protection options, and development of a WRAP Report and Implementation Plan for Sunfish lake, Thompson lake, Pickerel lake, and Rogers lake.
This project covers activities necessary to complete the major watershed restoration and projection project. The major objectives this project covers include contract administration, watershed coordination, stressor ID activities, identifying priority management zones, engage watershed citizens, and the creation of watershed restoration and protection plans.
This project will finalize HSPF watershed model construction by incorporating internal phosphorus loading in modeled lakes, run a suite of implementation scenarios and generate a GenScn project containing model output. The consultant will produce HSPF watershed models that can readily be used to provide information to support conventional parameter TMDLs. The consultant will deliver all modeling files for baseline and implementation scenarios and provide a GenScn project containing model output.
