On the heels of a number of reports on the beleagured status of Minnesota's waterways, the Star Tribune's Water in Mind series hopes to bring some awareness to water quality in the land of 10,000 lakes. The stats from the first article in the series, Minnesota's lifeblood, are startling:
- "When the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency tests a lake or stream against federal water-quality standards -- and these fall well short of pristine -- the odds are nearly even that it will flunk." The MPCA's 2006 list of impaired waters contains nearly 2,300 lakes and waterways that have flunked.
- "Agricultural runoff is now the single biggest pollution source, and the
problem is growing [because] farming has
always enjoyed broad exemption from the regulatory regimes applied to
other industries." - "More than 60,000 Minnesota households flush their toilets and drain
their kitchen sinks through "straight-pipe" systems that carry the
untreated waste into public waterways."
Furthermore, the MPCA has an annual shortfall in its water quality program of $9 million, meaning that resources are stretched thin for improving the situation. While the problem seems vast, given that many of the communities flushing waste into waterways lack the capital to install sewer systems, the solution to sewage isn't overwhelming: "If each household on a sewer line paid $3 a month on its water bill, and each using a well and septic system paid the same on its property-tax bill, most problems could be remedied in about 10 years."
That might solve the sewage problem, but how does a state with great pride in its agricultural productivity address the environmental consequences of ag?
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