Woodbury May Pay $700,000 To Measure All 580 Ponds

Does $700,000 to test Woodbury’s ponds seem like a lot to you?

It does to city officials, too.

Woodbury may have to shell out nearly $700,000 and send staff to all 580 of the city’s ponds in order to comply with proposed Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) stormwater regulations.

City officials say the regulations are burdensome, and have told lawmakers that the cost of compliance outweighs its benefits and that the MPCA is overreaching its legislative mandate.

“The MPCA does not have the staff to review all the information they would get from a pond inventory of every city in the state,” City Administrator Clint Gridley wrote in an email to area legislators.

In May, the MPCA is due to renew Woodbury’s five-year stormwater permit as part of the federal Clean Water Act. The permit requires cities to test their holding ponds for a potentially cancer-causing agent called PAH in order to gauge the scale of the problem.

But the details of how and how quickly cities should inspect their holding ponds was left unclear by the state Legislature, and Woodbury officials say the MPCA’s proposed regulations require data that is expensive to acquire, such as exact figures for pond and sediment depth.

“I think the intentions are good—trying to improve stormwater quality,” said Steve Kernik, Woodbury environmental planner. “But there are only four people in the MPCA in the stormwater division, and they’re going to get a barrage of information that they won’t be able to process.”

Woodbury estimated the cost of contracting out pond inspections at $1,200 for each of the city’s 580 ponds.

Lisa Thorvig, the municipal division director at the MPCA, said that the agency will work with cities before issuing the regulations.

“The Minnesota Legislature required us to conduct a pond inventory in our next cycle,” she said. “But the requirement is pretty open-ended on how fast we should go.”

The 2012 clean water permit is currently on public notice and not finalized.

Another proposed regulation requires that Woodbury reduce by 25 percent the amount of sediment that is released into local waterways. Gridley estimated the cost of this reduction—which could include holding ponds to filter out contaminants—at more than $840,000.

Sediment makes water turbid, reduces aquatic life and increases algae blooms, among other pernicious effects, but Woodbury officials said most sediment deposits were coming from agricultural areas. A recent study showed that in the South Metro Mississippi watershed, cites only accounted for 5.8 percent of the sediment load.

“The MPCA is only regulating the cities, where the mitigation is naturally more expensive,” Gridley wrote in an email to legislators. “It would be far more cost effective to go after the agricultural land users where the real problem is.”

Thorvig said that while agriculture may play a more important role than cities in Mississippi pollution, local waters are disproportionately affected by municipal runoff.