State of the Lakes

Photo of a lake on a cloudy day.

Minnesota is known as the State of 10,000 Lakes and the Land of Sky-Blue Waters. But who's looking after our trademark waters?

By Greg Breining

When my father bought lakeshore north of Crosslake in 1942, a tiny resort stood at one end of Eagle Lake and a smattering of cabins at the other. He had the choice of the lake.

In 1956, when he built a flat-roofed cabin, we had a neighbor, and cabins spread along the eastern shore. I was 3, too young to remember much except roaming the shoreline for frogs, but Dad recalled later, "If we saw five boats on the lake, that was a busy day.

As a teenager I would paddle across the lake and portage over a beaver dam into a pond to catch big bluegills. But a few years ago, bulldozers carved Golden Eagle Golf Course out of the forest around the pond. With the road to the course came expensive homes and speedboats. When my wife and I bought the cabin last year, we saw more skiers, powerboats, and jet skis than ever. The water was less clear, and the beach weedier.

What was happening to our lake?

I may be biased by the rosy memories of childhood, but I'm not the only lakeshore owner who's worried.

"People seem to realize the state of our lakes is changing," said Paula West, executive director of the Minnesota Lakes Association. "More weed growth, more boat traffic, and there's more development—their experience isn't what it used to be." Older residents "are concerned that their children and grandchildren won't be able to have the same experience that they did," West said.

The group has about 3,000 individual members, 200 lake association members, and 15 county coalitions of lake associations, representing more than 50,000 people. "I know that lakes are part of our Minnesota heritage, something we all identify with," said West, who lives on Upper Mission Lake near Crosby. "We say they are one of our most important natural resources, but we [as a state] don't devote much money to protecting them."

New Urban Centers

The fundamental threat to Minnesota's lakes is—Minnesotans. The explosion of development—the construction of new houses, the conversion of cabins to year-round homes, and the transformation of woodlands to suburbs—drives most threats to lakes. In Cass County alone, building permits increased from 1,300 in 1995 to 2,100 in 2002, according to John Sumption, deputy director of the county's Environmental Services Division. Last year 566 new buildings were erected, 80 percent of them on lakeshore.

"The lakes are really the new centers of urbanization from 1970 on," said George Orning, research fellow with the University of Minnesota Sustainable Lake Project. "If you start at Mille Lacs, you can walk to Bemidji and never leave a township or city that hasn't grown 20 percent in the last decade."

Lake-country growth won't stop. The populations of Douglas and Otter Tail counties, the popular lake area around Alexandria, will grow 38 percent by 2030 (compared with 27 percent statewide), according to the State Demographic Center. The five-county lakes region surrounding St. Cloud will grow 46 percent. Crow Wing, Cass, and Aitkin counties—"retirement magnets," according to the demographic center—will grow 65 percent as boomers retire and younger workers take their laptops to the lake home.

How well have we protected our lakes? And how prepared are we to protect them against this impending onslaught? I asked those questions of more than a dozen experts.

Green Lakes

Clean, clear water is the public's measure of a healthy lake. "Very seldom do I hear about people wanting to go to a green lake," said one township official. "They want blue water."

From the time they were created at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, Minnesota's lakes have been aging—slowly filling with sediment and increasing in fertility, with more plants, more plankton, less clarity. But human influence on land can kick this aging, or eutrophication, into high gear.

Leaky septic systems, agricultural runoff, and storm-water runoff contribute nutrients to surface waters, fertilizing algae blooms and turning lakes green and cloudy. Phosphorus plays a particularly big role in fertilizing lakes.

Lake monitoring records indicate not all lakes are deteriorating measurably. "There are no overall patterns," said Steve Heiskary, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency lakes research scientist. Heiskary has compiled Secchi disk readings (a measure of clarity based on the visibility of a white disk submerged in the water) from the PCA's Citizen Lake Monitoring Program on more than 800 lakes in Minnesota. "If we look at a hundred lakes for these kinds of trends," he said, "we'll find perhaps 70 percent with no trends at all."

A study of fossilized single-celled organisms called diatoms was more revealing. Working with the Science Museum of Minnesota, Heiskary and Ed Swain, another PCA research scientist, collected sediment cores from 55 Minnesota lakes. Identifying sediment layers from around 1750, 1800, 1970, and 1993, they examined diatom communities and estimated the amount of phosphorus in each lake over time.

Heiskary and Swain discovered that most of the lakes they examined in Minnesota's cities and agricultural areas showed serious eutrophication since European settlement. But they found no change in lakes studied in forested northern Minnesota, even those with homes on their shores. "I was a little surprised," Swain said.

Does the study demonstrate that homes and cabins have no effect on water quality? No, said Heiskary. "One doesn't want to paint that picture too broadly." None of the forested lakes studied was ringed by cabins, and none had tiers of houses going back from the shore. In all cases, the watersheds remained predominantly forested.

"I think it becomes a question of degree of development," Heiskary said. The two scientists are gathering more samples to refine their study.

As more homes and roads are built, the rush of nutrients from land to water increases. Among common sources of nutrients are on-site septic systems, especially where the water table lies close to the surface, where soils are thin (as on the North Shore of Lake Superior) or where systems are poorly maintained. Cass County, for example, reports that about a quarter of its septic systems are failing or illegal. Concerns about inadequate on-site treatment led Douglas County to build a $50 million sewer and sewage treatment system to serve homes on three lakes and their watersheds around Alexandria. The county now plans to expand the system to include six more lakes.

Septic systems aren't the only cause of eutrophication. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, construction of a simple cabin and small grassy yard on a forested lakeshore increases the sediment washed into the nearby lake fourfold (phosphorus runoff remains about the same). Construction of a year-round home with a suburban-style lawn to the water's edge increases phosphorus runoff sevenfold and sedimentation by nearly 20 times.

Another source of nutrients: impervious surfaces, including roofs, roads, and parking lots. Runoff from these surfaces brings not only phosphorus, but also metals, solvents, road salt, and street dirt and sand. In cities and suburbs, these pollutants flush through the storm sewers.

"The storm-sewer runoff is probably the greatest threat at this point," said Dean Beck, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources area fisheries supervisor in Glenwood. "It comes fast, it comes hard, and it's carrying a lot of undesirables with it."

The Trouble With Sugar Sand

Jed Anderson, DNR aquatic plant management specialist in Glenwood, was familiar with the property on Lobster Lake—a basswood forest that stretched along the shore. As the land was subdivided and sold, one landowner hired a bulldozer to clear his property, leaving one large tree at either corner of his lot near the water's edge. On each tree, he hung a wood-duck house. When Anderson visited, the landowner proudly showed him the birdhouses and declared, "I just love wildlife."

"I laugh about it and you laugh about it, but that's the mentality out there," Anderson said. Many landowners don't realize lakeshore woodlands are vital to birds, mammals, and amphibians. A 1997 study by the Wisconsin DNR and the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College found that development changes the songbird community.

Many people are also unaware of the value of aquatic plants. A lake's littoral area, the shallow water penetrated by sunlight, is a biological factory of invertebrates, fish, and amphibians. A recent Minnesota DNR study examined three lakes and their watersheds near Alexandria with varying levels of shoreline development. About 95 percent of crappies spawned along undeveloped shore, virtually always in the stubble of the previous year's bulrush beds. Largemouth bass were less affected by development, but preferred areas with a tree canopy along shore.

Shallow-water plants, especially emergent vegetation such as rushes, absorb the energy of waves, reducing erosion.

Despite the value of aquatic plants, said Anderson, "most people I'm dealing with want to remove vegetation from the lake. They want to do whatever it takes to get the job done. They want a sugar-sand beach."

Automatic weed-removal devices are illegal in Minnesota without a permit from the DNR. It is also illegal to remove emergent vegetation such as cattails and bulrushes or use herbicide in public waters without a permit.

"There's very little good lakeshore left to develop, and what is being developed is often marginal," said West of the Minnesota Lakes Association. As a result, people buy less than their ideal with the intention of transforming it by filling in wetlands, ripping out aquatic plants, and clearing land. "We know there's a lot of illegal activity going on," she said.

Quiet Rules

Shortly after Kris Hasskamp was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1988, she began to hear complaints about jet skis.

"More and more people, especially the seniors who had waited their entire lives to retire up here . . . after they moved, all of a sudden they had this invasion—they called it an invasion," Hasskamp recalled. "You put one of those on 200 acres or less, there is nothing else you hear. These nice people were ready to go down on their docks and shoot them. It's almost like Chinese water torture."

In 1997 Hasskamp introduced legislation to outlaw so-called personal watercraft on lakes smaller than 200 acres, regulate operating hours, and establish no-wake zones near shore and other boats. To dramatize the effect of the machines, she played a recording of a chain saw for legislators. Gubernatorial candidate Jesse Ventura, owner of several jet skis, dubbed her "Chain Saw Hasskamp." Hasskamp's bill passed—without the ban on small lakes—but enmity from the jet-ski industry and riders sank her re-election in 2000.

Surveys in central and north-central Minnesota show about the same number of boats on our lakes now as in the mid-1980s. But try telling that to lakeshore homeowners and boaters who complain that lakes are more crowded than ever.

"I think what is happening is that the boats are taking up more space," said Neal Gaalswyk, boat and water safety supervisor with the Crow Wing County Sheriff Water Patrol. "The complaint du jour is noisy boats." And 38,000 of Minnesota boats are personal watercraft. Though complaints have dropped since Hasskamp's law, said Kim Elverum, DNR Boat and Water Safety coordinator, "the number one complaint [on surveys] is still personal watercraft."

People have insisted on quiet—most notably in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where all but the largest lakes are off limits to motors. Outside the Boundary Waters, several hundred lakes—most in cities and suburbs—are governed by restrictions on motor size, boat speed, or boating hours. As lakes become more crowded, restrictions may spread to more rural areas.

"When you take a look at the waters south of us, boats have been getting bigger, motors have been getting bigger," said Reno Wells, chair of Cass County Association of Townships. "People have been getting away from the populated areas into the more remote areas. We don't have a problem with that, but we don't want people to hurt the water that we have. The first thought you have is you've got great big boats out there and the lake is destroyed—and for what? Just to let somebody do what they want to do."

Ten townships in Cass County and one in neighboring Hubbard formed a joint powers board that is developing a surface-water management plan, Wells said, to "reflect the paramount concern the town has for responsible recreational use."

Who's Minding the Shore?

Alan Cibuzar, president of A.W. Research Laboratories in Brainerd, photographs shorelines at a height of 1,000 feet from his Lake Buccaneer, an ungainly airplane pushed along by a single rear prop at a steady 80 miles an hour. Cameras mounted in the wings image narrow slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, each revealing different landscape features, such as heat sources and reflections from chlorophyll produced by photosynthesizing plants.

Examining the images back in the lab, Cibuzar and his staff can spot filled-in wetlands and lakeshore, sources of runoff, and even septic tanks, drainfields, and septic plumes buried several feet underground. They have even found drowning victims to depths of 62 feet. Cibuzar is hired by lake associations, landowners, and local governments to uncover violations of zoning codes and other environmental laws.

So how well are our laws protecting our lakes? "Could be better," Cibuzar said. He regularly flies more than 200 miles of lakeshore for Thirty Lakes Watershed District. "You always get about 35 guys doing the wrong thing. It's not questionable. They're breaking the law. You'd think that after all these years you wouldn't get somebody just decimating 1,500 feet of shoreline. Just totally, illegally decimating it with no permits or anything. Clear-cutting, just ripping it out, filling in the lake bed, filling in the whole works. Just screwing it all up."

But they do. Enforcement is not what it should be, Cibuzar says. Nonetheless, "from when I started business 30 years ago, it's exponentially better."

Russ Schultz, DNR lake management supervisor in Brainerd, agreed that inadequate enforcement has undercut good laws regulating septic systems and other sources of nutrients. "It's getting worse," he said. "With our budget crisis, that's one of the areas where there will be less enforcement."

Fragmented Solutions

Good lake management begins with scientific data. Unfortunately, we don't have enough.

Water-quality monitoring is erratic and inadequate, according to a 2002 report on cumulative impacts of development on lakes by the University of Minnesota Water Resources Center. Voluntary monitoring—by PCA citizen monitors and many other volunteers—helps, and "the information-base available on Minnesota's lakes would be much poorer without these efforts," the report said, but "no single agency is responsible for coordinating monitoring activities." Furthermore, "indicators of other impacts of development, such as shoreline habitat, noise/solitude, and crowding, are not measured routinely."

The problem doesn't end there. "The primary goal of lake monitoring programs is to provide the information needed to support appropriate resource management decisions," said the report. "However, the most important and arguably the most difficult challenge for governmental units is implementing appropriate management decisions based on data from monitoring programs."

George Orning of the university's Sustainable Lake Project agreed. "People are pouring into the lakes region," he said, but the state has a "fragmented management system that is trying to cope with urbanization and can't do it."

In Minnesota, regulating lakeshore development falls largely to county governments. Many observers point to Cass County as a leader in protecting shorelines. Like other counties, Cass must meet minimum state shoreland standards, which are monitored by DNR Waters. But Cass enforces stricter rules, such as those preventing removal of trees and brush along shores and bluffs. The county monitors septic systems through a renewable operating permit and records from septic tank pumpers. To get a permit for building, conditional use, or variance, a landowner must earn "mitigation" points by, for example, restoring native shoreline vegetation.

"We've got a very progressive county board that understands which side their bread is buttered on," said John Sumption of the county's Environmental Services. "They understand the environment is the economy up here."

Meanwhile, Itasca County classifies lakes according to their sensitivity to development. Most vulnerable are lakes that are shallow and have a small watershed-to-surface-area ratio. "We're not sure at this point how it will be applied," said Art Norton, district manager for Itasca County Soil and Water Conservation District. But classification might justify tougher standards for vulnerable lakes.

Unfortunately, state funds for county water planning fell victim to this year's budget cuts. Ron Harnack, executive director of the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, said he hopes counties will continue water planning on their own. "I'm confident many of these counties have integrated this water planning into their day-to-day processes."

What Must Be Done

To better protect lakes against the crush of new residents and users forecast for the coming decades, the Minnesota Lakes Association advocates stronger state laws to (1) reduce the flow of nutrients from storm water, agricultural lands, and substandard septic systems; (2) raise standards for counties in regulating shoreland development; and (3) funnel more money to local water management. "We have no dedicated source of funding for lakes," said association director West, "even though what people think of when they hear Minnesota is lakes."

Orning said public lakeshore must be managed for the benefit of lakes, even at the expense of other uses, such as forestry. Furthermore, he said, lake users will demand the development of more recreational facilities such as hiking trails, more protective fishing regulations, and more aggressive DNR leadership to resolve watercraft conflicts on crowded lakes.

Marilyn Bayerl, a consultant on water resources issues and board member of the Minnesota Lakes Association, said, "Legislatively, I think the best thing that can be done is to give a tax break to people who leave their property natural or put it back to being natural."

Bayerl said lake residents and users must lead the charge to protect lakes. "You're a large number and you all vote and you can get things accomplished."

DNR hydrologist Russ Schultz agreed. The 1969 state Shoreland Management Act set minimum standards for county lakeshore zoning, and the DNR still provides technical assistance, but "the real things that can get done are at the local level." What makes the difference between protection and neglect of our lakes often comes down to concerned citizens and local officials, Schultz said. What's needed in every case is "a spark plug of a landowner who really cares about things and really rallies the troops."

Greg Breining is a freelance writer and a contributing editor of the Volunteer. You can write to him through his web site: www.gregbreining.com.

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