With time slipping away on the availability of $200,000 in clean water grant funds, local watershed district officials have taken steps to sweeten the deal they’ll offer to potentially interested landowners.
The deadline to use the remaining Clean Water Partnership grant funds is less than a year away for both agricultural and urban best-management-practices projects and the Heron Lake Watershed District has increased both cost-share and incentive program funding amounts in an attempt to make them more attractive.
“Because of the level these cost-share and incentive program funds were at previously, they weren’t enticing enough to landowners for them to take advantage of them, so we have increased those amounts for a number of projects, thinking that will help,” said Jan Voit, director of the Heron Lake Watershed District. “Anyone interested in doing one of these projects on their land can contact my Heron Lake Watershed District office or our watershed technician, Ross Behrends, and he will go out and look at the project site, then help them with the project design for their land. Ross will make recommendations as to what he believes are best ways to put that project in.”
Behrends then recommends the landowner contact a dirt contractor to do the work or a landscape company, depending on the project recommended and the work that needs to be done. And that can depend on the site where the project will be located, the size of the project and what the landowner wants to do.
However, rain gardens are a project many folks enjoy doing on their own, Voit said, after Behrends has helped them with the design. Many of the projects are done on marginal land, although some of that land may have been used for crops in the past. Typically those projects can be completed in as little as a few weeks, in the case of rain gardens, or a month or two for the larger projects.
“We try to cover 75 percent of the project costs with the grant funds,” Voit said. “The remainder is the responsibility of the landowner. But it doesn’t always work out that way, because if we are partnering with the state or with a federal program, the money we can supply a landowner is limited to more like 50 percent of the project’s cost.”
Some of the projects funded through the grant for agricultural and urban best-management-practices and the changes include:
•?75 percent cost-share up to $10,000 for terraces, waterways and critical area plantings
•?75 percent cost-share up to $20,000 for created wetland/flood storage
•?75 percent cost-share up to $10,000 for shoreline restoration
•?75 percent cost-share up to $2,000 for rain gardens
•?$1,000 per acre one-time payment for restored wetland basin acres incentive
•?$100 per acre one-time payment for filter strip incentive
•?$100 per acre one-time payment for field and farmstead windbreak incentive
“Ross checks the actual construction over to see that the work is done properly after he approves the projects,” Voit said. “Then, the final plans and bills get submitted here. I issue payments and keep track of where these projects are located. At the end of the year, we enter all of the information on all of the projects into a database. I also make that information available on our Web site and send it to the state of Minnesota.”
So who actually benefits from all the individual projects and the work involved in setting them in place?
“Everybody living in the watershed district benefits from these projects,” Voit said. “Ultimately, the water in the streams and lakes will be clean over time. These grant funds come from the state and are administered through the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. The Clean Water Partnership grant was established in the early 1990s. We have been the recipient of those funds on several occasions.”
If the $200,000 from the grant is not used up by Aug. 31, 2010, the remaining funds will revert back to the state, Voit said.
“To be considered again for this grant, we have to make good use of the money we have,” Voit said.
