The Cook County Planning & Zoning Department’s plan to assemble a Wetlands Management Plan Committee has been postponed. A grant from the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources was poised to fund a process to explore the development of a wetlands management plan tailored for specifically for Cook County. Planning & Zoning Director Tim Nelson talked to the county board on February 19 about why he thought the plan should be dropped for now.
In a February 14 memo to the board, Nelson wrote, “We have recently received information that a relatively new wetlands management plan from another jurisdiction within the state [Sauk Centre] did not receive full Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) support for approval, even after they themselves had participated within the local process and provided a letter stating their intent to support. With that information in hand, we decided to postpone the initiation of our own Wetlands Management Plan committee process until we were able to better determine the reason for the lack of full Corps support and whether that could impact our own local plan initiative.”
Nelson referred in his memo to a Technical Evaluation Panel meeting that included representatives from the county, the Cook County Soil & Water Conservation District, the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, and the Army Corps of Engineers. “Through the course of the meeting it became apparent that the level of support that we had been led to believe would exist from the ACOE through their participation in the process could not be counted on through our proposed level of local planning,” Nelson wrote.
At the county board meeting, Nelson said the point of the proposed committee was to try to get some flexibility from the Army Corps of Engineers in creating a local wetlands management plan and to have some autonomy as a county. He said the Army Corps is now saying they’ll only allow more stringent plans, not more flexible plans, at the county level with a wetlands management plan. “Nobody wants to spin their wheels if we’re not going to come out of it with the result we had wanted,” he said.
In a separate interview, Nelson said the Army Corps of Engineers would only allow flexibility in a “Special Area Management Plan” (SAMP) that would require gathering much more scientific data. “Apparently the SAMP was created through the coastal program and has been used by the state of Louisiana in dealing with their coastline in the Gulf and the special habitats in the delta and bayous,” he said. “Normally a state would commission a SAMP, and then it would be contracted out to environmental firms to complete.
“The plan that we were looking to develop was the more generalized “Wetlands Management Plan” (WMP), which is still rather helpful for the local governments to express their stated goals for the wetlands resources but stops short of containing all of the specialized wetlands data that’s required for the SAMP.”
Nelson wrote in his memo that they are looking into whether the grant funds could be used to conduct an inventory of wetlands within the county. “We do have the option to continue with the plan process in an effort to determine our own local priorities within our wetland program,” he wrote, “however it would have to be continued under a different set of expectations.”
The board passed a motion authorizing the termination of the plan.
In other county news…
. Tim Kennedy of the Superior Cycling Association told the board he would be presenting them on February 26 with an application for a U.S. Department of Transportation Recreational Trails Program grant, requesting that the county lend its support and act as fiscal agent for the grant. The application will request approximately $60,000 of funding to build two miles of mountain bike trail on the Pincushion trail system in Grand Marais and another two miles on the Britton Peak trail system in Tofte.
The association’s goal is to have 20-25 miles of mountain bike trail in each location.
. As of the end of 2012, the county had $27,374,965.78 invested in CDs, money market accounts, bank accounts, and other government agencies. The county earned $231,415 in interest. The most interest it earned in one year in the last decade was $751,901 in 2007, right after the “housing boom,” Auditor-Treasurer Braidy Powers said. The least it earned in the last decade was $190,131 in 2003, right after the “dot-com bust.”
According to the county’s investment policy, its top objectives in investing financial assets, in order, are safety in preserving capital, ability to liquidate readily as cash is needed, and yielding market rates of return as long as the first two objectives are not compromised. The county diversifies its portfolio to avoid “over-concentration” in any area.
. The Cook County Local Energy Project (CCLEP) was on the agenda to present a service agreement that could be used with businesses and government agencies interested in hooking up to the proposed biomass-fueled district heating plant in Grand Marais. CCLEP representative George Wilkes told the board that they would prefer to come back on March 12 so that they would have time to discuss the issue more with Commissioner Garry Gamble, who he said had some reservations about the project.
The proposed service agreement document estimates the cost of the initial system to be $9 million, although the 21 customers that could hook up would not pay to connect to the system. The system could be expanded to include other customers, keeping base rates lower and ultimately costing less than fossil fuel sources of heat.
George Wilkes of CCLEP said he thinks the project would need some outside financial help by way of grants or low-interest loans. He said government programs that have funding for projects of this kind are available.
The board will talk in more depth about the project at its March 12 meeting.
Leave a Reply