September 8, 2009
To Partners and Friends of Great River Greening:
The Comfort Lake –Forest Lake Watershed District, in partnership with the City of Forest Lake and Great River Greening, will collaborate again to improve three more shorelines within the right-of-way of dead-end streets ending on the shores of Forest Lake. The three sites include: 4th Street SE, 236th Street Court N, and 237th Street Court N. Last year the organizations together completed three other shorelines.
In fact, numerous street dead-ends and street right-of-ways occur around Forest Lake which end directly on the shores of Forest Lake. The worst of these sites are simply corridors of crumbling bituminous leading to reed canary grass and debris, with areas of erosion and small gullies where sheet flow—and pollutants--from the street run directly to the lake.
Designed by Greening’s new team of streambank and lakeshore ecologists, the projects will replace a road bed and modify the drainage ditches with upland settling basins and native plantings in order to slow down the run-off and potentially reduce run-off volume and associated nutrients to the lake.
Great River Greening’s design uses state-of-the-art practices for such a situation. A portion of each road and right-of-way will be prepared to provide sufficient space for the settling basins and plantings. The street-side of the project area will allow water to enter a basin through a series of stone check-dams. The interior of the basins will include native plants and shrubs typical of a native wet meadow. The lake-side of the basins will be graded to form a small berm with an emergency overflow and stabilized with native plantings that stretch to the shoreline of the lake. These will all be appropriately stabilized with erosion control blankets and biologs, especially where water flows into and out of the basin.
While the projects are scheduled to begin the fall of 2009, additional plantings will take place in the spring of 2010.
Funding for these projects is provided by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
For more information on this and other Greening conservation programs, contact Wayne Ostlie, Conservation Director, wostlie@greatrivergreening.org, 651-665-9500 x19. Also visit our website at www.greatrivergreening.org
Major operating support for all Great River Greening programs is provided by The McKnight Foundation.