Long Lake Creek Subwatershed Assessment: Kickoff Newsletter

This is the kickoff newsletter for the Long Lake Creek Subwatershed Assessment Project, a partnership between the Cities of Medina, Long Lake, and Orono, Long Lake Waters Association (LLWA), and Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD) to improve the quality of lakes and streams in the Long Lake Creek Subwatershed. 

Throughout the process, we will provide regular updates on the project via this newsletter and on the MCWD project webpage.

Overview 

Five lakes in the Long Lake Creek Subwatershed are listed by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency as being impaired for water quality due to excess nutrients: Holy Name, School, Wolsfeld, Long, and Tanager. Recognizing the need for a holistic, systems-based approach to addressing these issues, a partnership formed between the cities within the subwatershed, LLWA, and MCWD. 

In 2018, with the support of the partners, MCWD obtained a $112,000 grant from the Board of Water and Soil Resources to coordinate the development of a science-driven “implementation roadmap” to improve the health of the system. 

This roadmap will provide strategic action steps each partner can take to work towards the mutual clean water goals of the partnership. It will distill the complex scientific understanding of the Long Lake Creek Subwatershed into a cohesive plan for targeting strategic investment. It will define roles, project opportunities, and potential funding sources to help ensure successful implementation. 

MCWD is leading development of this roadmap, using a four-phase process to combine scientific analysis of water quality issues with an understanding of local context, priorities, and land use plans. 

• Phase I. Understand resource needs (nearing completion)
• Phase II. Understand land use plans (January 2020 to March 2020)
• Phase III. Integrate and prioritize (March 2020 to June 2020) 
• Phase IV. Develop implementation Roadmap (June 2020 to August 2020) 

Phase I: Understanding resource needs

There are several key sources of nutrients within the system that cause lake impairments within the Long Lake Creek Subwatershed, including stormwater runoff, internal loading, degraded wetlands, and carp. 

Through extensive monitoring and analysis, MCWD has developed an understanding of how these individual drivers influence the health of the subwatershed as a whole. This work included: 

• Intensive water quality monitoring: Bi-weekly sampling of several lakes and multiple stream locations to diagnose the most significant issues
   
• Watershed modeling: Building a detailed computer model of the many ways water travels through the system—sewer systems, ponds, wetlands, streams, culverts—in order pinpoint the highest-impact solutions  
   
• Analyzing in-lake conditions: Analyzing sediment samples from each lake to understand its “internal loading”—how nutrients like phosphorus that have settled on the lake bottom are released back into the water—and determine whether this is a significant contributor to the nutrient impairment 
   
• Understanding common carp population dynamics and their ecological impact: Documenting current ecological health conditions of fisheries and vegetation communities, quantifying the carp population(s), their migration patterns, and the nursery habitats used by carp across the subwatershed in order to understand how to sustain long term population reductions

What’s Next? Transitioning from scientific assessment to implementation planning

With the scientific assessment of the system wrapping up, the project is transitioning to the planning phase of the process: developing strategies, action steps, timing, funding, and roles for the implementation roadmap. Future newsletters will provide more detail on these steps. 
 

MCWD is in the process of  convening individual meetings with each partner to better understand its capital improvement plans and development projections, as well as goals and strategic initiatives.

MCWD will combine land use information and partner feedback from individual meetings with the rich scientific understanding from Phase I, in order to identify high-impact opportunities. The District will then convene workshops with the partners to evaluate and prioritize the identified opportunities. 

MCWD will develop and refine an implementation roadmap that includes actions, roles, schedule, and funding strategies.