Once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity will re-imagine Hiawatha Golf Course and help fix garbage problem;
weigh in on golf course designs on Sept. 15
by Tesha M. Christensen
Since May, Standish-Ericsson resident Sean Connaughty has
removed 62 bags of garbage from Lake Hiawatha.
That’s over 1,500 pounds of plastic cups and bottles, snack
wrappers, cellophane, cigarette butts and more.
It doesn’t count the invisible pollutants such as lawn fertilizers
and herbicides, ice-melting salt and automotive pollution that are washed into
Lake Hiawatha and from there into Minnehaha Creek, the Mississippi River and
the city’s drinking water.
“With each bag of trash there are 1-4 syringes. I also
regularly remove condoms and diapers, to name a few of the disturbing items,”
said Connaughty.
“In addition to the environmental and ecosystem damage this
is causing, it also poses a public health risk,” Connaughty pointed out. “With
items such as syringes, diapers, condoms and all manner of pollutants regularly
entering the lake, it is no surprise that there are regular beach closings due
to high bacteria levels.”
The urge to pick up trash as he was walking his dog twice a
day around the 55-acre lake began simply enough, but as Connaughty’s concern
about water quality grew it has propelled him into a larger fight.
“Despite my best efforts to clean the lake and the efforts of
the recent Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD) organized clean-up, the
lake is once again full of trash from recent rainfalls,” observed Connaughty.
LESSON FROM A GREEN
BALL
Along the way, Connaughty learned an important lesson from a
green golf-ball-size ball.
Connaughty marked the ball and then dropped it into the storm
drain. Two weeks later, he found the ball among the debris clogging the lake
around the storm sewer culvert on the north side.
“The storm sewer outfall on the north side of the lake is
emptying enormous amounts of trash and pollution into the lake with every
rainfall,” Connaughty remarked.
While many have believed that Minnehaha Creek is the primary
source of pollution in the lake, Connaughty’s day-to-day observation of where
trash is located has shown that the storm sewer outfall is the bigger problem.
Connaughty learned that this drainage system, going directly
into the lake, includes a huge swath of South Minneapolis. “It drains debris,
trash and other pollutants from our streets coming all the way from Chicago
Ave. to the west and Lake St. to the north,” he observed. “This storm drain
system has no filtration or mitigation at all.”
To share this knowledge with fellow residents, Connaughty
began stenciling gutters with the outline of a fish and the reminder: “Please
do not pollute, drains to the Mississippi River.” Connaughty has personally
stenciled 175 gutters, and he was joined by a group in August organized by the
Standish-Ericcson Neighborhood Association.
HOW TO FIX THE PROBLEM
In addition to spreading the word about the pollution
problem, Connaughty is pursuing other methods to prevent trash from entering
Lake Hiawatha, Minnehaha Creek and the Mississippi River.
He’s begun lobbying local political organizations, including
the Minneapolis City Council, MCWD, and Minneapolis Parks and Recreations for
infrastructure that will filter out pollutants before they enter the lake.
Along with a few others, he has proposed building an
emergency catchment in the lake surrounding the storm sewer outfall. It would
be constructed of natural materials and would create a porous barrier to
capture the trash at the culvert. A strong trellis-like structure could
accommodate the varying conditions at the lake without restricting the flow of
water.
“This would be a way to localize the trash to make it easier
and presumably less expensive to clean up, rather than having the trash spread
throughout the entire lake,” explained Connaughty.
The emergency catchment could be implemented immediately once
they receive permission.
A permanent solution would be changing the storm sewer
infrastructure to create a catchment pond that can capture debris and
pollutants before they reach the lake. Other lakes have these types of filters,
including the “Lake Amelia” catchment ponds nearby at Lake Nokomis.
GOLF COURSE MEETING SET
FOR SEPT. 15
The timing on Connaughty’s suggestions coincides with the
Park Board’s new vision of a more natural shoreline for Lake Hiawatha following
the approval of a Master Park Plan last year, and plans to modify the golf
course that are underway now after last year’s flooding.
“There is currently a once-in-a-generation opportunity to
alter the storm sewer system that will occur when the golf course is
restructured next year,” pointed out Connaughty.
He added, “Changing the storm sewer infrastructure would
dramatically improve the water quality in the lake.”
Several others agree that now is a good time to find a fix to
this problem.
According to Parks and Recreation Commissioner Steffanie
Musich, “The city of Minneapolis, Minnehaha Creek Watershed District and
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) have been working to identify
holistic designs for the course that not only retain golf playability at the
site, but also help other park users gain greater access to the lakeshore,
reduce localized flooding in surrounding neighborhoods, reduce pollution
entering the lake via stormwater pipes, and enhance the ecological function and
storm water capacity of the creek.”
She pointed out that improvements upstream of Lake Hiawatha,
including in the pipeshed, have the potential to reduce pollutants. The golf
course improvements would only be a few pieces of a larger effort the MCWD and
their partners have undertaken to undo the damage done to the creek and Lake
Hiawatha by development of modern storm water conveyance systems to prevent and
reduce the flooding of homes and businesses in the cities the creek runs
through.
A public meeting to collect feedback on the proposed designs
will be held on Sept. 15, 2015 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Nokomis Recreation
Center Gym.
‘RESPONSIBILITY TO
LEAVE IT BETTER THAN WE FOUND IT’
MCWD Vice President Brian Shekleton praised Connaughty for
doing a tremendous job expanding public knowledge about what happens to water
flowing into the lake by using multiple tactics that draw attention to
potential solutions. In addition to stenciling gutters, he is organizing
neighborhood blocks to monitor streets for trash.
Shekleton pointed out that history and hydrology matter in understanding
why Hiawatha is a polluted, or impaired, lake. A wetland complex that extended
many blocks to the north and west of the lake used to filter water flowing into
the lake. It’s now mostly homes in the Northrup, Bancroft, and SENA
neighborhoods -- and the golf course.
“Those water-cleaning wetlands can’t be replaced but there
are effective techniques to restore ecological functionality,” remarked
Shekleton. “Things like filtering basins, architected wetlands, and
re-meandering the creek come to mind.”
According to Shekleton, MCWD has many projects upstream that
will benefit the lake, “but partnering with the MPRB and the Minneapolis gives
us a chance to spend money most effectively by leveraging each organization’s
specialties to better water quality in the lake,” said Shekleton.
He pointed out a similar partnership upstream that will
benefit Lake Hiawatha. In St. Louis Park and Hopkins, tons of
pollutants will be removed from Minnehaha Creek that now flow down
downstream into Lake Hiawatha. This will happen by stopping storm pipes from
dumping into the creek and filtering the storm water before the water flows
into the creek.
“I’m confident we’ll make Lake Hiawatha a cleaner and
healthier body of water, particularly with the addition of natural filtration
ponds through the golf course; this work will also help make the surrounding
neighborhoods more flood resistant by increasing stormwater storage capacity,”
said Ward 12 Council Member Andrew Johnson. “I love Lake Hiawatha, and we have
a responsibility to leave it better than we found it.”
CONTACT COUNCIL TO
VOICE OPINION
Connaughty observed that the parks, watershed district and
golf course have only recently begun to consider making changes to the
infrastructure of the culvert. “Whether this plan will be adopted or not is
still quite tenuous. If this major outfall going directly into the lake is not
addressed the garbage and pollutants will continue to impair this critical
habitat and the water quality will remain poor,” Connaughty said.
“The city is the only entity involved in the negotiations
that has the sole authority to implement an infrastructure change. Therefore I
recommend contacting the mayor and your councilperson to voice your opinion on
this matter.”
This story appeared in the September 2015 Messenger.
