Farmers, landowners manage flooding
Published 12:00 am Monday, October 2, 2000
LANSING – Flood control has been going on in Mower County for a long while.
Monday, October 02, 2000
LANSING – Flood control has been going on in Mower County for a long while.
While these measures can’t by themselves stop the record-setting 100-year floods that occurred in 1993 and 2000, they can help.
Also, there is the potential for more of the projects to be undertaken throughout Mower County. Farmers and other rural landowners are taking the steps to properly manage water and soil resources.
"I wish more people would do this," Gus Maxfield observed. "We could use more of this all over Mower County."
Maxfield and his wife Ann own land in Lansing Township along the Cedar River and east of the village. It’s an example of a program that has been in existence for 13 years that partly has helped control flooding.
According to Gus Maxfield, it has been a pleasure to work with the Mower County Soil and Water Conservation District on their Reinvest In Minnesota Reserve Program project.
Voz said he appreciated Maxfield’s praise, but he wants more landowners to enroll in a program that among other things could help control flood waters that plague Austin.
Proposal isn’t new
What former Minnesota legislator Leo Reding proposed only a week ago to the Mower County Board of Commissioners is nothing new.
Reding wants the Mower County Board of Commissioners and city of Austin to enter into an agreement to seek bonding bill monies – $100,000 or more – to undertake a pilot flood control project near Austin.
At its simplest, it would create a water retention pond or basin to store excess ground water after heavy rains and allow it to be released into streams at a gradual rate and therefore reduce the flooding potential.
"That’s essentially what the conservation easement program’s projects are doing," Jon Voz said on a tour of the Maxfield property in Lansing Township. "The conservation easement program involves the acquisition of specific land rights for conservation purposes like flood control."
"Landowners who offer the state a conservation easement receive a payment to stop cropping and/or grazing the land," Voz said, "and, in turn, the landowners initiate conservation practices such as establishing vegetative cover or restoring drained wetlands."
The easement is recorded on the land title at the county courthouse and transfers with the land when the parcel is sold.
Voz is a resource specialist for the Mower County Soil and Water Conservation District.
Each time, Dobbins Creek, the Cedar River and Turtle Creek overflow from torrential rains, the three waterways cause flooding downstream in the city of Austin.
This summer’s flooding brought with it a hue and cry for Austin officials to do something that would help permanently alleviate the flooding. Simply acquiring residential properties from flood victims and moving the people out of neighborhoods in the flood plain is not, by any definition, a flood-control project. The work, critics say, must be done upstream in the watersheds that bring flood waters rushing through the city and into neighborhoods and businesses.
Voz claims conservation easements can provide part of the solution to flood woes.
Restoring wetlands
The Maxfields own 68 acres that have been shifted into the conservation easement program. In all, there are 190 acres adjoining the Maxfields’ land along the Cedar River north of Austin.
Voz said the area is a classic example of where restoring wetlands can reap benefits that are permanent.
"Actually, there are five water basins interconnected by field drainage systems and at different levels," he said. "This is marginal cropland that serves little or no purpose for cropping. Also, the cost to do the project is within the guidelines of the program and that is that such work must be economically feasible."
The Reinvest in Minnesota (RIM) program is administered by the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources; the Mower County SWCD administers the program locally.
The project has taken some three years as it nears completion this month.
"The Maxfields agreed to enter the program first and then the other landowners agreed to do the same when we showed them what we could accomplish," Voz said.
Popp Excavating of Osage, Iowa, was the low bidder for the work after a licensed design engineer approved the plans.
Already a new retention pond as been created and native grasses planted as the drained wetlands are restored.
"Fifty-two landowners across Mower County have been enrolled in this program that has some 1,600 acres," Voz said.
Since 1994, more farmers and other landowners are coming forward to see whether their land qualifies for the program and Voz said there is the potential for more parcels of land to be certified for the program.
Projects than can be as long as four years in the making take only weeks to complete.
The state’s contribution to the RIM Reserve Program nearing completing in Lansing Township project is only $26,000, according to Voz, for the construction work only. Payments vary across the county by township and land use history – cropped or non-cropped.
Next year, four projects are slated to begin, including another large one in the Cedar River area.
Voz emphasized restoring drained wetlands through such a conservation easement program is not a cure-all for flood woes in Austin.
"It’s just one step," he said. "Forest management, soil erosion practices on the uplands and conservation tillages, there are a lot of things that need to be done to truly have a great impact on flooding in such a flat county as Mower."
"This just proves that one good idea and one good project can make a difference," he said.
For more information, call Voz at 434-2603.