We have three important topics on the docket:

• Concerns from the rise of vacation home rentals in lake country
• Septic systems and their impact to water quality
• The upcoming statewide elections and how that may influence the 2025 Legislative session in St. Paul.

Register anytime before the meeting. The Zoom link for the meeting itself will be provided following registration. You will also receive an email from Zoom with the meeting link and more details.

Our meeting will start with Chris LeClair, the Director of Otter Tail County’s Land and Resource department. Otter Tail County is a leader in establishing an ordinance regarding vacation home rentals. The county’s ordinance went into effect on July 1 of this year.

Vacation home rentals can impact public health, safety, quality of life, as well as water and environmental quality. Many of your lakes, towns and counties are wrestling with vacation home rentals and their impacts, so looking into Otter Tail County’s new ordinance will make us all smarter.

Our meeting is being held during the EPA’s SepticSmart Week 2024 (purely coincidence), and since many our lake and river properties use septic systems or holding tanks, we thought that would be a great tie in to our collective interest in water quality. And it also ties into our meeting’s first speaker, as septic system are one of the vacation home rental concerns.

We are very fortunate to have Sara Heger, from the U of MN’s Onsite Sewage Treatment Program setting the stage at our MN COLA meeting to talk about the connection of septic system and water quality. Sara is also leading the webinar on “Being Septic Smart” at 7 pm CT on the same day as our meeting. She is the go-to person for all things septic! You’ll hear Sara at our meeting and you’ll probably want to register for that webinar

Last, but certainly not least, Jeff Forester of MN Lakes and Rivers Advocates will brief us on November’s statewide elections, where you may want to get involved, what the elections that might mean for the 2025 Legislative session, and what MLR is thinking about their Legislative priorities for 2025.

Register anytime before the meeting.