By Dan Linehan
MANKATO — After more than a decade of cleanup efforts, the Minnesota River is showing encouraging signs of health with lower pollution and sediment levels.
No one group can take all the credit.
Cities are increasingly treating their discharge into the river. Mankato has been singled out by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency as a model of phosphorus cleanup.
Farmers have turned over more than 100,000 acres of formerly cropped floodplain to grassland as part of a government program that compensates farmers for letting cropland lie fallow.
When cropland floods, the water leeches harmful nutrients and pesticides out of the soil. But that doesn’t happen when the Minnesota floods on native grassland, which also acts as a buffer between the river and farmland by absorbing farm runoff.
Scott Sparlin, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for a Clean Minnesota River, said that this grassland effort, called the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, has had a “profound effect” on the Minnesota River.
A January report from the MPCA found declining pollutant levels in the Minnesota over the last few decades. A 2002 study found a 31 percent decrease in the total number of suspended solids in the river near Jordan.
And the region is making progress on treating its wastewater.
According to the report, about 40 small communities didn’t treat their wastewater in 1996. Of those communities, 29 have fixed the problem by building a water treatment plant or by hooking up to a neighbor’s facility.
City dwellers play a role, too.
“Every city street is a tributary to the Minnesota River,” Sparlin said, because storm sewers empty, untreated, into the river. Grass clippings, dead leaves and other organic debris that wash into sewers along with the rain can pollute the river.
But the job is nowhere near complete, Sparlin and the MPCA agree.
From the report: “Some say that we have failed or that we haven’t made enough progress. In reality, the job is much more complicated and challenging than many people realized. It’s about changing society, which will take time.”
And Sparlin says the cleanup is “going places” but the Minnesota faces continued challenges.
Eighty-seven percent of the Minnesota River Basin is cropland. About two percent of the land lies fallow permanently.
Many communities still can’t muster the resources to clean up their wastewater.
“They’re doing something, but it’s insufficient,” Sparlin said.
Still, Sparlin said that cities, farmers and regulators used to argue about the river basin, and nothing got done.
But that has changed.
“People have gone from denial to working about the problems,” he said.
