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Solutions for cleaning up the Minnesota River and reducing the escalating frequency of flooding in the river's basin lie in our own back yards.

However, getting the job done calls for county, state and federal attention, according to a large number of speakers at the recent Minnesota River Basin Joint Powers Board annual meeting and conference in Montevideo. It also calls for innovative compensation schemes for landowners and for learning from topography of the past.

The polluted river drains 16,700 square miles of land across 37 counties, according to board data. It flows 335 miles from Big Stone Lake on the Minnesota/South Dakota border, to its confluence with the Mississippi, which winds south to the Gulf of Mexico.

"The entire watershed is now plumbed with tiles and drainage ditches to get that water into the rivers and off the land as fast as possible," said Dick Kroger, who has a long history of public work with streams and rivers across the country and who is a volunteer with various organizations involved in cleaning up the river. "The solution to a timely cleanup lies in the halls of Congress."

Very little of the water that affects Granite Falls and other river-front communities during flooding situations comes from within city limits, said Dave Smiglewski, Granite Falls mayor.

"The solution isn't just to deal with flooding in Granite Falls. We need answers to address the basin," Smiglewski said. "For a hundred and some years, there's been a lot of public and private investment put into drainage enhancement and efficiency. That has made agriculture what it is here today. Generally speaking, agriculture is pretty important out here. It's the engine that drives the whole existence for us. But there is a down side to having water draining so quickly, and our community is certainly suffering from that."

The problem stems from building an agricultural industry over the natural landscape, rather than building an agricultural industry within a matrix of the natural landscape, said Donald Hey, senior vice president of The Wetlands Initiative and director of Wetlands Research, Inc., both based in Chicago, Ill.

"If you want more fishing, if you want cleaner water, and you want a better-looking environment, then you have to restore the wetlands, and you're going to have to restore the drainage systems, which include the flood plains," Hey said. "In the last 100, 150 years, we have continued to push water out of the watershed. What we need to do is start looking at storing the water where it falls. If a watershed would have held moisture for two or three weeks, today, it's held for two or three hours. And that conversion is what's causing the problems."

In 1992, the National Research Council stated in the publication "Restoration of Aquatic Ecosystems" that 10 percent of wetlands need restoring nationwide. Hey believes great improvement in water quality and flood control is possible with the restoration of as little as three, to four percent of wetlands across the Minnesota River basin. This would reduce agricultural production areas by only one or two percent, because while most of these bottom-land areas are rich, they fail to produce crops with great frequency, Hey said.

"That relates to about 300,000 acres of wetlands across the watersheds. All of that acreage could be placed into the Federal Emergency Management's definition of the 100 year flood plain, where we shouldn't be cropping, where we shouldn't be building our homes and our shopping centers," Hey said.

Developing a conceptual plan targeting restoration areas across the basis is the wisest, most expedient course of action, Hey said.

"If they keep it within the FEMA limits, then they're killing two birds with one stone because what they're doing is eliminating flood damages, and they're increasing flood storage," Hey said. "And when you increase flood storage, you slow the river down so all the chemical reactions, the biological reactions can take place to purge the stream of contaminants."

Hey's non-profit organization is seeking funding from the McKnight Foundation to draft a flood control plan for the upper Mississippi River. Groups working on the Minnesota River could apply for similar funding, Hey said.

Convincing farmers to give up cropland is another matter. Hey believes society needs to place a value on land holding water, and reprocessing and holding nutrients. Then, it must establish a method of compensating farmers for these services.

For instance, instead of a municipality spending millions of dollars on building a new treatment plant to take high levels of nitrogen out of the water, it could pay farmers to reduce their nitrogen levels. Or, nitrogen could be rated on a point system, and farmers who choose to produce more nitrogen runoff could buy nitrogen points from farmers who reduce their levels, Hey said.

"I don't think the people upstream should be able to discharge willy-nilly into the water and turn around and be paid to take it out, though," Hey said. "But that could start an open market. We need large scale demonstration projects across the country with our universities involved."

Once restoration begins, results are rapid, Hey said.

"Are you going to have that little pristine wetland [of the past]? No," Hey said. "But you are going to have landscapes that function to provide those ecosystem services, to provide these values to society. And they will do it within six months of restoration."

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