Sara Heger, U of MN’s Onsite Sewage Treatment Program set the stage at a recent MN COLA meeting to talk about the connection between septic systems and water quality. She discussed Minnesota’s rules, as well as how a properly operated septic system functions, and what and how things can go wrong. She is the go-to person for all things septic!
Sara’s presentation can be seen HERE.
VRBOs and similar rental situations are raising some concerns among lake residents and one county has set rules and processes for managing rental properties to the benefit of all shoreland owners and users. Chris LeClair, Director of Otter Tail County’s Land and Resource department explained the new rules and led an excellent discussion of Otter Tail County’s Vacation Home Rental Ordinance. The presentation can be seen HERE.
We have three important topics on the docket:
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.
This spring has brought a variety of state actions to address the personal safety and ecological impacts of enhanced wake watersports.
Vermont is now implementing the toughest restrictions in the US. Maine has passed a bill calling for a 300’ distance from shore and a new study. Michigan introduced legislation but the uproar was enough to stall it out for now. Wisconsin passed legislation calling for a study.
And MN COLA is continuing to follow the path we agreed to with our lobbyists with MN Lakes and Rivers Advocates to first get science completed, then build a strong base with the watercraft operator’s license and mandatory education including best practices for enhanced wake watersports.
There’s more to each story, so read on.
Vermont’s new rule for managing wake boats on inland lakes and ponds went into effect on April 15, 2024. The new rule includes three important changes described below:
• The water depth is at least 20 feet.
• The wake boat’s distance from shore is at least 500 feet; and
• The wake sport zone (determined by 1 and 2 above) is more than 50 acres.
Despite hurdles that rendered legislation dead in 2023, a new law was signed by the Governor on April 9, 2024, with provisions including:
House Bill 5532 was introduced on February 29, 2024, specifying thata person shall not operate a vessel in wake sport mode on waters of this state where the water depth is less than 20 feet. A person operating a vessel in wake sport mode shall maintain a distance of not less than 500 feet from the shoreline or a dock, a raft, a buoyed or occupied bathing area, or a vessel moored or at anchor.
The negative response to the bill introduced was anticipated, but the sheer volume of emails against responsible regulation was staggering. Unfortunately for political election reasons, this bill might not get a committee hearing until after the November General Election.
Senate Bill 1016 with prohibitions for lakes smaller than 1,500 acres and minimum distances of 700’ from shore and 20’ depth of water is off the table because the public pushback was very powerful.
In a compromise, Assembly Bill 1171 requires the University of Wisconsin System to submit a plan for conducting a wakeboat study and request funding for conducting the wakeboat study in the 2025-27 fiscal biennium. Even the bill for the study didn’t make it out of committee in time, so it is dead.
Wisconsin can do local ordinances and a few local jurisdictions that have started creating limits for wake boats.
Cook County received approval from the MN DNR on their proposed wake surfing ordinance for Caribou Lake near Lutsen. This is a first surface water use ordinance on wake surfing and enhanced wakes in Minnesota. Specifically:
WAKE SURFING: Wake surfing, defined as the untethered use of a surfboard behind a watercraft, is prohibited on Caribou Lake in any area that meets one or more of the following criteria:
WAKE ENHANCEMENT: No person may operate a boat on Caribou Lake in an artificially bow-high manner, in order to increase or enhance the boat’s wake. Such prohibited operation shall include wake enhancement by use of ballast, mechanical hydrofoils, uneven loading or operation at transition speed. Transition speed means the speed at which the boat is operating at greater than slow-no-wake speed, but not fast enough so that the boat is on plane. It shall not be a violation of this ordinance to operate a boat through the ordinary transition from no wake to up on plane and from on plane to no wake.
MN Lakes and Rivers Advocates (MLR) published an overview of their strategy and approach to the wakes issue. Nothing changed from their previous direction.
MN COLA embraced the MLR direction early on, and we are committed to the approach. We worked hard to get the research funded. We worked hard to get the Watercraft Operator’s License bill passed. We embraced the Phase 1 report from the St. Anthony Falls Lab when it was published, and we look forward to the Phase 2 report addressing the depth of water concerns. With the Phase 2 results, we will be able to push to include both distance from shore and depth of water in the best practices section of the mandatory education component of the Operator’s License.
There are actions happening in other states, but these are some of the most interesting. And as expected, the watersports industry is pushing back hard on any proposed regulation, so each state action is quite a slog.
What do Kathryn Hoffman (left), Dr. John Rogers (right), Jeff Forester (top), and Hilarie Sorenson (bottom) all have in common?
They are all speaking about water at the MN COLA Annual Meeting on June 18 from 9 am – 11 am CT. The meeting is guaranteed to be interesting and informative, and we hope you will attend.
Register here for the Zoom meeting.
Meeting topics and speakers:
As always, everyone welcome to attend, so feel free to forward this meeting information.
Vermont ’s Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) recently filed its “Final Proposed Rule” for regulating wakesports on the state’s inland lakes under the heading “Final Rule Documents Submitted to LCAR.” The filing triggers another step in the process whereby the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules (LCAR) reviews the proposed rule. The Committee will be considering this proposed rule on February 1, 2024. If “adopted” the proposed rule will be filed with the secretary of State to become effective on the “effective date”.
The final version of the proposed rule retained the requirement for wake boarding to be done a minimum of 500’ from shore despite overwhelming public comments asking for a 1,000’ minimum. If the LCAR votes to adopt the rule, Vermont will have the most restrictive regulations in the country for wakesports. The final proposed rule includes a 500’ minimum distance from shore, a minimum depth of 20’, a ‘wakesports zone’ as having a minimum of 50 contiguous acres, and a “home lake” approach to help reduce the potential for wake boats to spread AIS from residual water in their ballast tanks.
Stay tuned!
In June 2022, Paul Radomski from the MN DNR presented the ideas from this newly released paper at our MN COLA Annual meeting. This was one of the sessions in our Lake Resiliency series.
Now the Vanishing Natural Shorelines paper has been published and you can read the whole story of how the loss of natural shorelines contributes to the degrading of lake quality. Tom Nelson, MN COLA Secretary and Itasca County SWCD Board member, was a key contributor from MN COLA. We encourage you to read and disseminate this document.
As Steve Kloiber from the MN DNR has written: “The Minnesota Natural Shoreline Partnership was formed around the idea that regulatory approaches to shoreland protection have not been sufficient to stop the loss of natural shoreland. This group has chosen to focus on the idea that there is a need to change social norms around how people think of their shoreline.”
We should individually and collectively do everything we can to stop the loss of natural shorelines and reclaim lost shorelines. Let’s change the social norm so natural shorelines are preferred.
We are very excited to have Ted Rulseh speak at our Annual meeting in Little Falls on June 13. His book Ripple Effects: How We’re Loving Our Lakes to Death chronicles the reasons behind our vanishing natural shorelines and other impacts to lake life.
To whet your appetite, we think you will enjoy reading the preface. And if you haven’t got a copy of the book yet, you will have an opportunity at the Annual Meeting.
Nothing I’ve read better describes the primal attraction humans have to water than these words from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
For some of us, that water is the ocean or the Great Lakes; for some, wide rivers or rushing trout streams; and for others, like me, the clusters of bluewater jewels in the parts of North America sculpted by the glaciers. The waters differ, but the allure is the same.
To say there’s magic in it is no hyperbole. I’ve been addicted to lakes since I was eight, when I spent a weekend with my father and older brother on Duck Lake, in the big woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The straight, rough trunks of two majestic pines framed the sweeping lake vista from the screen porch of the cottage. Down a short path from the porch stairs, waves of tannin-stained water lapped against a beach of coarse sand sprinkled with pebbles of milky quartz. At the water’s edge, irregular mounds of brown-on-white foam quivered in the wind.
Until that weekend, I had never seen a bald eagle, stood beneath such tall trees, or heard the distant wail of a loon. The lakes near our home, amid a landscape dominated by dairy farms, were small, weedy pools, surrounded by houses and cottages, many with mowed lawns, barren of trees. At Duck Lake, white pines and spruces, maples and birches towered over the shorelines. Except for a modest log house on an island across a quarter mile of water, I could see no other structures from a vantage point on the beach. For years after that first visit, my family—Mom and Dad, four boys and four girls—took a week (sometimes two) of summer vacation at the cottage, owned by one of Dad’s coworkers. Now, six decades later, I still visit Duck Lake at least once a year, fishing from one end to the other, but always ending at sunset anchored just out from the site of that old cottage (recently demolished), above the weedy rock-and-sand bar where, as kids, we sat in rowboats and soaked bits of nightcrawler for perch, bluegills, sunfish, and bass. I’ve come to know the lake well, all eleven hundred acres, yet I still discover something new each time I go.
One type of discovery concerns me: every year it seems someone has built a large new house on the shore, in some cases sacrificing the trees for a landscape worthy of a country club golf course. Duck Lake is still far enough north, far enough from the tourist-magnet towns, to have remained suitably wild. Many other lakes are less fortunate. The traditional Northwoods allure largely persists, but each year more wooded lots are bought and built upon; each year more small cabins, in the same families for decades, are sold off and larger houses erected. Along with this trend come added stresses on the lake ecosystems, some quickly obvious, others less so: Nutrient pollution and algae blooms. Invasive species. Failing septic systems. Bigger and higher-powered boats creating wakes that can erode shorelines. A changing climate. Meanwhile, state and local government programs aimed at lake protection are, in many cases, severely understaffed and underfunded.
All this is sobering, and so is the reality that, as a lake property owner and resident, I am part of the problem. I had wanted a place on a Northwoods lake ever since those long-ago Duck Lake summers. My wife and I finally got one in 2009. We had always thought of buying an existing cottage in order to avoid contributing to the rampant buildup of lakefronts. As it turned out, we bought a vacant lot on a wooded slope above Birch Lake in northern Wisconsin’s lake-rich Oneida County, and there we built a modest two-bedroom home.
Our sensibilities being what they are, and based on what we had learned over the years from people we considered good lake stewards, we chose to tread lightly, mainly by keeping the woods of white pine, hemlock, balsam, and oak between the house and the lake fully intact. But we’re not inclined to nominate ourselves for some kind of stewardship sainthood; we have impacts on the lake by the mere fact of living where we do. In the realm of lake advocacy, there is no room to be self-satisfied.
Meanwhile, amid all the threats to our lakes, there are causes for optimism. Many lake residents have left their properties reasonably natural; long sweeps of shoreline remain wooded, especially on lakes partly within state, national, or county forests. Loons and eagles and other wildlife abound. Fishing is generally good. Water quality in most lakes is still high. There remains a vast treasure of natural bounty and scenic beauty to protect. Most important, armies of lake advocates are at work daily—in state natural resources agencies, in universities and extensions, in county and local governments, and in myriad groups such as watershed councils and lake associations—promoting sound property development practices and good lake stewardship.
Still, for someone in love since childhood with a wilder Northwoods, the trends are concerning. No one is doing damage on purpose; no malignant force is at work to degrade the lakes. No sinister industry dumps in pollutants—threats like acid rain and toxic mercury deposition from electric power plant emissions were largely cured years ago by federal and state regulation.
No, the simple truth is that we who live on the shorelines are loving our lakes to death. Like Melville’s Ishmael, we’re enchanted by water. We want our lakefront homes, our boats and boathouses, gazebos and lawns, garages and storage buildings. And if we’re not careful, we risk setting the lakes on a course for slow, steady, and possibly at some point irreversible degradation.
The fundamental reason we harm the lakes is not that we don’t care. It’s that we often fail to connect what we do on the land with what happens as a consequence to the lake—to the water’s clarity; to the fishes’ reproduction, growth, and survival; to the overall health of the lake ecosystem; to the desirability and value of the homes on the lakeshore; and to the quality of lake country life itself.
This book aims to help establish the connection. I’ve interviewed lake experts of many stripes from around the region and reviewed numerous research reports, all to understand the nature and severity of threats to our lakes, their underlying causes, and the cures available. The information can serve as a guide for how, together, we can enjoy our lakes while providing the optimum measure of protection.
There are remedies for most of what ails our lakes; many simply require changing the ways we live on and around them. Government regulation and financial support surely must play a role, but the remedies in large part depend on all of us doing the right things—one property, one home, one boat, one lake at a time.
From Ripple Effects: How We’re Loving Our Lakes to Death by Ted J. Rulseh. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved
The subheading tells it all… “we’re loving our lakes to death”. This book should be required reading by every shore owner. The author describes how we’ve gotten to this point, what all the big issues are, and in the last chapter he poses some solutions. It’s published by the University of Wisconsin Press and you can get it from all major book retailers.
Lakes are among the Upper Midwest’s greatest treasures and most valuable natural resources. The Great Lakes define the region, and thousands of smaller lakes offer peace, joy, and recreation to millions. And yet, in large part because of the numbers of people who enjoy the local waterways, the lakes of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota face numerous challenges. Invasive species, pollution, defective septic systems, inadequate shoreland zoning laws, and climate change are present and increasingly existential threats. We are, quite possibly, loving our lakes to death.
Read More…
Trying to stuff ten pounds of something into a two-pound bag? That’s the approach of 2nd Tier Developers. Continuing on with MN COLA’s focus on Lake Resiliency, attorney Tim Keane discusses the impacts of 2nd Tier developments on lakes and rivers. Tim describes what they are and why you should care.
Click here to watch the video.
