(Spirit Lake)– A committee that was assembled shortly after last month’s flood to start looking at possible flood mitigation along the Little Sioux River held its second meeting today (Tues.). The group discussed the possibility of expanding the Little Sioux River Headwaters Coalition, a watershed management authority, or WMA. That entity is governed through a 28E agreement that is currently made up solely of cities in Dickinson county and the county itself. Under the proposal, that group would be expanded to include cities in Clay county as well as those in portions of Cherokee and Buena Vista counties and their respective boards of supervisors. Clay County Supervisor Allen Batschelet…
“And we’ll begin to approach the corporated areas in Clay county to see if they have interest in this. Those will be the ones that are affected, so I’d like to do that as quickly as possible within the next couple of weeks for sure we’ll be contacting them and educating them on what is being discussed. I don’t really have a hard timeline but I would hope we could move pretty quickly here, maybe by the end of August. At least get everyone informed and begin to educate them on what we settled on here today.”
Batschelet says in his opinion expanding the current WMA makes more sense than forming a new one…
“I’m not familiar with all of the requirements but we would have to go find every affected entity and get them educated and informed on what this is all about and then get them to go through their approval process and then we would have to identify who would lead the new agency, where it would be, what are the boundaries going to be for it. It would be a pretty heavy lift I think, and not expeditious. My sense is that we could move more quickly by joining the already established watershed management authority that’s been in place the last 15 years.”
Batschelet says he feels confident expanding the Little Sioux River Headwaters Coalition would be an effective move at addressing flood mitigation downstream…
“You know we have a situation here where collectively we are all affected but we’re not working together, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, it’s just kind of the way things have unfolded over the years with different jurisdictions attempting to solve what really is a problem that affects a region that is really difficult to understand how bit it is. Everything that drains into the Little Sioux and the Ocheyedan and beyond, we’re affected in one way or another. The engineers have a really hard time saying who all’s affected, but intuitively as a lay person you can look at it and say there’s tens of thousands of us that are affected by the watershed that we’re living in.”
Dickinson County Supervisor Steve Clark says the possible expansion of the Little Sioux River Headwaters Coalition will be a topic of discussion at that group’s next meeting August 14th. He says they’ll also be hearing at that meeting from a Minnesota-based engineering firm that’s done some work in the Little Sioux Watershed in that state on some possible recommendations…
“Houston Engineering is going to present their study that they did for the Little Sioux Headwaters Coalition and it’ll show some directions that we need to move, some things that could be done. It will be kind of almost like a blue print of where we can go in the future.”
The current members of the Little Sioux River Headwaters Coalition would need to be in favor of updating the current 28E agreement to allow the additional cities and counties to join.
A date for the next meeting of the Little Sioux River Flood Control Committee will likely be held in late August, but an exact date hasn’t been set.
