Confluence of factors make water a dominant theme in bonding bill process

In both population and industry, Big Lake has grown over the years.

The city in Sherburne County had about 2,200 residents in 1980. By 2020, its population rose to 11,700.

In between, a major employer, Cargill, opened an egg processing facility in the city. It sits in an industrial park that has gradually filled up with more businesses.

All of this development has pushed Big Lake’s wastewater infrastructure, built to meet the needs of the past, closer to capacity. It’s gotten to the point that the city would have trouble accommodating another large employer, said Hanna Klimmek, city administrator.

“If another one of them wanted to come through, that would cause a challenge,” she said. “We may not have the ability to service them, so that puts us in a really terrible spot because we want to welcome a significant user.”

As a way to meet future needs by expanding its wastewater treatment plant, the city requested bonding bill funding from the Legislature this year. Big Lake is among hundreds of other cities or counties across Minnesota seeking state aid, and many of their applications share a certain liquid in common.

Whether local governments are trying to treat it, filter it, collect it or drill wells to find it, water is a dominant theme in bonding bill requests and discussions surrounding them at the Capitol.

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Erin Campbell, Minnesota’s Management and Budget commissioner, addressed the state’s “huge demand” for water infrastructure funding when she presented Gov. Tim Walz’s proposed budget last month.

“One-third of local government requests that MMB received, which total nearly $1 billion, were actually for water infrastructure projects, and we know that this only represents a portion of the need,” she said.

A MinnPost analysis of all local government bonding requests found a similarly large proportion of water-related projects this year. About 34.7% of all dollars requested would go toward such projects, coming out to a combined $1.1 billion. Most of the requests came from Greater Minnesota communities.

Why does water loom so large in bonding discussions?

Minnesota’s nickname is a simple but instructive starting point for answering this question. Water is all around us, and every community has an interest in keeping it clean, said Elizabeth Wefel, a lobbyist with the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities.

“We’re the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and in addition to those lakes we have quite a few big rivers,” she said. “To keep those clean and make sure we can recreate in it and we can drink it, we need to be taking the steps to ensure we have the infrastructure necessary for that.”

Getting clean water from its source to taps doesn’t come cheap, nor does treating it once it flushes down a toilet and arrives at a wastewater plant. A combination of aging facilities, updated regulations and rising construction prices contribute to costs shooting upward in recent years.

“Our wastewater and drinking water facilities, a lot of those are aging,” Wefel said. “Many facilities are coming to the end of their useful lives.”

Water funding’s importance doesn’t seem lost on lawmakers. City leaders testify to it at the Capitol. Committees hit the pavement for site visit field trips, including to Big Lake last fall, to learn how state dollars would be used.

So if a bonding bill, which authorizes the state to borrow money for local infrastructure projects, fails this session, it won’t be because the Legislature is in the dark on needs. The needs just have to outweigh a host of other issues in order for the bill to happen.

Rep. Mary Franson, R-Alexandria, who co-chairs the House Capital Investment Committee, brought up the stakes of opposing a bonding bill at a recent hearing focused on PFAS mitigation. Several cities, including Apple Valley, Hastings and Sauk Rapids, are requesting funding to mitigate the “forever chemicals” out of their water supplies.

A bonding bill shouldn’t be used as political leverage when the money from it can provide clean drinking water to Minnesotans, Franson said.

“We also have citizens across the state of Minnesota that don’t want us to have a bonding bill, either, and want to use it as leverage against the administration and think it’s really sticking it to them,” she said. “Well that’s not appropriate and that’s not how we should be doing business.”

Rep. Roger Skraba, R-Ely, said water infrastructure would ideally get specific and recurrent funding. Under this scenario, projects near or at readiness would receive awards through the state’s Public Facilities Authority, which runs loan programs for water projects.

“I think it should be a dedicated amount every year,” Skraba said. “And $300 million seems to be fair. That way we know every year something’s gonna get done.”

Skraba’s colleague on the committee, Rep. Ned Carroll, DFL-St. Paul, agreed that the argument for a bonding bill seems overwhelming to cover basic needs, let alone other projects.

What water projects could a bonding bill fund?

In all this year, local governments in Greater Minnesota accounted for about 72% of the water infrastructure requests and about 32% of all project requests. For MinnPost’s analysis, we narrowed the full list of requested projects down to those that involved upgrading or building drinking, waste or stormwater facilities.

Other common requests for capital investment include road construction, new or renovated municipal buildings and park projects. Many of these projects technically involve water, like a new road needing utilities underneath it, but water infrastructure isn’t the primary reason for the request.

In Big Lake, a $25 million request for wastewater improvements is about expanding treatment capacity and updating aging facilities. The plant, on city land abutting the Mississippi River, has infrastructure dating back to 1980.

Cracks are showing and paint is chipping on building exteriors. Inside, the facilities are managing between 800,000 to 850,000 gallons of wastewater per day on average, said Dan Childs, the city’s water and wastewater superintendent.

The plant can keep up with the load, Childs said, for now.

“Big Lake is expanding, and we need to grow with it,” he said at the site Tuesday.

The city is about 30% of the way through its design phase for facility improvements. About $2 million in recent federal earmarks kept the process humming along, but state funding represents an outsize side of an equation that could add up to more than $62 million from start to finish.

“We do as much stuff in house as we can,” Childs said. “But the big purchases, it gets very expensive.”

Another city looking for state funding this year is Henderson, located along the Minnesota River in Sibley County. City water from a nearby aquifer is drinkable despite high iron and manganese contents, as long as residents can look past the discoloration.

The city hears about the issue regularly, said Mayor Keith Swenson.

“It tends to leave what’s best described as rust deposits in the water distribution system,” he said. “If there’s a shock to the system, like a fire call where they turn on a hydrant, you’re going to get that rust deposit charged up in the system.”

As in Big Lake, Henderson recently received a federal earmark, this one going toward a filtration plant that would address the discoloration problem. At $750,000, the federal funding chips away at what could be a $7 million project. The city’s request to the Legislature this year is $3.2 million.

Potential growth factors into Henderson’s desire for a filtration plant. For decades the city has been vulnerable to flooding from the river, causing lengthy detours when arteries in and out of the city become submerged.

A construction project to raise one problematic roadway, Highway 93, is nearing completion this year. Swenson could envision more people moving to his city, located less than 60 miles from Minneapolis, if only frequent detours were left in the rearview. And if only the water discoloration issue got solved.

“We might see population growth, and the water situation could color, for lack of a better pun, our growth,” he said.

Finding clean water is like striking gold

Becker, only about eight miles away from Big Lake, is in a similar boat as Henderson in some ways and Big Lake in others. Though smaller in population than Big Lake, it is seeing similar rates of population growth.

Current water supplies are adequate in Becker for the time being. The city has been drilling wells as part of its forward planning, said city administrator Greg Lerud.

“I’ve been here since 2022 and we’ve probably drilled somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 test wells,” he said.

Finding water isn’t an issue. The tricky part is finding adequate supplies that don’t need to be expensively treated.

An abundant source that doesn’t need much treatment is like striking gold for a city considering the cost savings associated with it. The sheer number of water infrastructure funding requests shows how rare this is.

Some of Becker’s newfound water sources had too many nitrates, an expensive compound to treat. Some of it had iron and manganese, the same elements that Henderson is trying to rid from its system.

Becker wants $1 million from the state to help it design a treatment plant. In the early stage of seeking funding compared with other cities, Lerud said he wants water infrastructure to stay high on the Legislature’s radar this year.

“This is really our first foray,” he said. “It’s a tough environment to be asking for money, but we think our request was modest.”

This story was originally published by MinnPost and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.