Push to uproot invasive plants in Lake Minnetonka spurs opposition

Karena Casey stepped onto her dock on Lake Minnetonka and was overcome by the stench from mats of weeds.

“Who takes care of this lake?” she recalled thinking. “It’s a jewel. It’s a treasure in the Twin Cities.”

Casey, who lives in Orono, is among a group of residents advocating for the creation of lake improvement districts, which collect taxes or fees from people living along some bays to cover projects that bolster the quality of life on the waterfront.

The debate has brought a tough question to the surface: Whose priorities win out on the metro area’s big destination lake?

Proponents say they’re trying to ensure the safety of swimmers and protect the ecosystem as other funding sources for fighting invasive aquatic plants dwindle. They’re meeting passionate opposition from people who are worried about how chemical herbicides might affect life — for them and the fish.

The fight is spilling onto social media and into city council meetings, as leaders in Orono, Mound and other cities along the lake sort through conflicting demands. Many people want a more coordinated plan for the plants — some call them weeds — but they disagree on who should provide it.

“It’s kind of turning the bay against itself,” said Ed Rockwell, who opposes the effort to create an improvement district on Harrisons Bay in Mound.

There are 57 lake improvement districts in Minnesota, including one approved last month for Stubbs Bay in Orono. Residents can petition their city and county leaders for them, or local officials can create them. Each district must focus on improving lake life, but the specific projects they tackle vary.

Recent proposals for districts along Lake Minnetonka have focused in part on efforts to manage curly-leaf pondweed and Eurasian watermilfoil.

“These plants are both documented as showing up in a place and slowly increasing their own dominance” as native plants decline, said Mike Verhoeven, aquatic invasive species management consultant for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

The DNR offers some grants to help manage invasive aquatic plants, but demand has outpaced resources, with about 20% of proposals receiving funding this year, according to department statistics.

The Lake Minnetonka Conservation District, a regional agency tasked with preserving the lake, previously used donations to provide grants to chemically treat some bays. It also ran a weed harvesting program that aimed to improve navigation on the lake “which we discontinued when its effectiveness was unclear,” Ann Hoelscher, the district’s board chair, said in a statement.

Local nonprofits have been raising donations to pay for treatment of individual bays, but some organizers hope lake improvement districts will provide more sustainable funding.

“When you start improving the quality of the lake, especially with the invasive weeds, then people don’t see the problems as much within the bay,” said Sheri Wallace, board chair for the Harrisons Bay Association, which gathered signatures to try to create an improvement district. “About year three of what you’re doing, you start to see a decrease in the donations.”

Fees for the proposed Harrisons Bay district — which could come before the Mound City Council later this summer — range from $50 for someone whose property doesn’t immediately abut the lake to $500 for a marina.

Organizers of the Stubbs Bay district in Orono anticipate the fees will run between $200 and $250 per property, though the budget is still being developed.

Not everyone wants treatments to continue — and some adamantly oppose lake improvement districts for that reason.

Rockwell lives along the southern shore of Harrisons Bay in Mound, in a section where he doesn’t normally see weeds. He worries about the long-term effects of swimming in water treated with chemicals, among other concerns.

“I don’t want to be part of an HOA or a LID,” he said, adding that he would prefer to see one agency, such as the DNR or the Lake Minnetonka Conservation District, make decisions for the lake.

Supporters of lake improvement districts counter that any treatments they use are regulated by state and federal agencies.

The question of whether to use chemical treatments or manually pull plants depends on many factors, Verhoeven said, including their number, how big of an area they cover and how likely they are to spread to other parts of the lake.

Johnny Range, who runs the nonprofit Westonka Walleye Program, said he and his neighbor on Harrisons Bay had an agreement not to cut the vegetation between their homes — specifically because it attracted fish.

“We enjoyed fishing around it until they chemically treated the vegetation,” Range said, adding that he now goes to other bays to fish.

Range said he hasn’t seen a robust enough plan for reintroducing native plants to justify the elimination of what’s there now, and he questions whether the right people are making decisions for the lake.

“I don’t think we need another layer of government bureaucracy adding taxes to us so they can determine what’s best for the lake,” Range said. “I think that the quality of fishing is much more important and having healthy vegetation is more important and brings more value to my home.”