Faced with controversy, park board once again fails to govern
Messenger guest column by Ian Young of Hiawatha 4 All on April 28, 2022
Excerpt:
More delay will not change the facts of this problem or cause a magical solution to arise where there wasn’t one before. Meanwhile, continued inaction is causing tangible harms:
• As anger rises on both sides over the constant revisiting of this issue, the rhetoric surrounding it is becoming more bitter and divisive.
• More than 1,000 pounds of trash per year enters the lake from the stormwater pipe. Some of this trash remains in the lake and harms the ecosystem there, while some of it travels downstream into Minnehaha Falls and the Mississippi River.
• An unquantified amount of phosphorous pollution enters the lake from a combination of upstream agriculture, golf course runoff, and groundwater pumping. This contributes to the lake’s murkiness and causes toxic algae blooms that keep the beach closed much of the summer.
• We continue to roll the dice on when the next flooding event will damage the existing golf course. The concern is a “10-year” flood event, which happens on average once every 10 years. Nobody can predict when the next one is, but we are now eight years past the last event, so the odds are only getting worse. FEMA assistance was required to recover from the 2014 flood, and they have made it clear that they won’t be stepping in a second time.