Agenda - Environmental Policy Board - 12/01/2014

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in order to continue to reap the benefits they were installed to achieve. Unfortunately, grant funding sources are not designed to help defray this cost and few government entities have incorporated active maintenance programs into their budgets. This challenge can be seen with stormwater quality treatment ponds installed in the early 1990s that now require expensive dredging and sediment disposal to maintain intended functionality. At a smaller scale, agency staff are dealing with the inspection and maintenance of potentially dozens of practices installed in cooperation with landowners such as riverbank and Lakeshore stabilization, ecosystem restorations, and rain gardens. The staff time and expertise required to conduct routine inspection and provide maintenance guidance is daunting for local government entities. Nitrogen pollution in surface water, most prevalently in the form of nitrate, has emerged in recent years as a priority concern statewide due to a number of studies showing the toxic effects of nitrate on aquatic life, nitrogen's role in the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and the potential to contaminate drinking water beyond the 10mg/L consumption threshold. An extensive Minnesota Pollution Control Agency report completed in June 2013 indicates that the bulk of the problem in Minnesota is found in the drain tiled agricultural areas of the southern third of the state. Nitrate discharge concentrations in watersheds in Anoka County are all well below the 10 mg/L threshold. Habitat Toss and fragmentation due to development, disturbance, and invasive species encroachment has the potential to push many indigenous species out of the county. When the housing market crashed and development came to a screeching halt in the late 2000s, this issue took a back seat to more pressing economic challenges. With the recovery of the housing sector, we are once again seeing many of our remaining natural areas forever lost to development. This occurs not only due to mass grading and the installation of roads, utilities, dwellings and structures, but also due to large acreage mowing, which essentially converts complex ecosystems into biological voids, supporting little more than a suite of a few invertebrates adapted to turf grass. Resource Priorities and Goals The Anoka Conservation District Board of Supervisors identified the following five priority resource areas (in bold) with corresponding goals (bulleted) during the comprehensive planning process with consideration of input from the public and agency staff and officials. ACD realizes that it is not practical to address all issues of degraded natural resource quantity and quality within the five year scope of this plan. As part of the comprehensive planning process, however, we did consider the breadth of natural resource challenges and opportunities and developed strategies designed to achieve the greatest overall benefit. Water Quality • Maintain high quality surface waters • Improve impaired surface waters • Protect drinking water Water Quantity • Halt long-term aquifer depletion and where possible replenish aquifer levels • Reduce stormwater runoff and the corresponding erosion page 8 Anoka Conservation District Comprehensive Plan October 2014