(Spirit Lake)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors today (Tues.) voted unanimously in favor of a request for the county to sign a letter supporting the city of Lake Park’s application for a SRF loan application. City Administrator Marie Mathiesen tells KUOO news it would go toward building a wastewater treatment facility that would replace the current lagoon system…
“Due to our new DNR permit we can’t maintain the regulations that they are requiring so we had to look at a whole new way of doing it and the council opted to go with a mechanical plant. It’s an expensive project. It’s one that we’re a little bit being forced to do due to the new DNR regulations or EPA regulations passed down through the DNR. So we’re also going to, since we have to spend that money, take advantage of maybe using some of that additional money that we get back to just some other water quality projects.”
Mathiesen says a provision of the SRF program would allow the city to help out with those projects that would benefit Silver Lake…
“How that works we can get about one percent of what we’re borrowing to be used for additional water quality projects. We’ll be looking at some rural projects; we’ll also be looking at some urban projects within the city that we can do to help with storm water runoff or those types of things to just keep the water quality that’s flowing into whether it’s the lake, whether it’s into the creeks, just to keep that at a better quality so that we’re maintaining a higher quality in the water and in the watershed itself. There probably will be some hard looking at the actual watershed as we know it. Most of the runoff from the watershed ends up in Silver Lake, so we’ll be looking at some projects that we can be doing out there to improve that quality around the lake which is a high priority right now since we’ve got so much working going on right now with the DNR and Silver Lake with the diagnostic studies, with the lake shore armoring, so we’ll be looking pretty heavily probably at the lake area.”
Mathiesen says the wastewater facility project has an estimated cost of $6 million. She says the city of Lake Park has also applied for a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant. She says they hope to hear soon whether or not the city will be getting that.
On another matter, the board of supervisors took no action on a request to sell some county-owned property just south of the fire station in Lake Park to the city. Mathiesen told the supervisors the land would be used for a possible future expansion of the Fire Department, which could include an EMS facility. Assistant County Attorney Lonnie Saunders said he wants to research the legal process the county would need to follow to sell that land before a dollar amount would be decided upon. The county obtained the property years ago by tax default for $219, but it has an assessed value of $5,300.
