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Informational Meeting Planned To Discuss Drainage Issues

January 10, 2025 Steve Schwaller

(Spirit Lake)– Drainage concerns in an area of southeastern Dickinson county, including a portion of Terril, was a topic of discussion at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. A petition was filed by a landowner seeking improvements. The Supervisors Tuesday reviewed an engineer’s report that would involve work on a branch tile in Drainage District 61. Colin Klingbeil of the Jacobson Westergard Engineering firm reported on his findings at Tuesday’s meeting. He says it impacts about 1,400 acres of land in that area along with a number of properties on the northern and eastern sides of Terril…

“The existing tile that runs up to the east side of the residential area of Terril, it doesn’t actually go through there and cross over to the west side of the county blacktop there and that’s something we would be proposing that we would do is go all the way to the west side of the blacktop. There’s an intake there on North State Street I guess water comes pushing out, comes up out of the intake, and that’s been happening for some time. In the records I saw that there were complaints of that happening back in the ’80’s.”

Klingbeil says the existing tile through a good deal of that area is 100 years-old and is severely undersized for today’s standards. He adds the estimated price tag for the improvements currently being proposed is significant…

“It ends up being an average of about $1,500 an acre. There’s things that we can talk about as far as, alright, if that’s too high then there’s things that maybe we could shorten some things or maybe remove a branch improvement or something if the landowners feel they could tile that more economically privately.”

The supervisors Tuesday voted to hold a public informational meeting with affected landowners on January 28th. A letter informing them of that meeting will be sent in the mail. A separate informational meeting will be held that same day for some proposed work in Drainage District 25. Letters will be sent to those affected landowners as well.