I'd like to call to other the parks and trails commission work session February 20th 2025 and we'll start with the roll call Christian here Anderson hereid here Nao here um ster here okay excellent thank you everybody equate the crew had a lot of names what that was that was pretty good uh okay South Park Rush Creek Ste stream restaurant project don't you step up tell your name and everything else oh God it uh good evening uh I'm Dereck ashy I'm with the city of Maple Grove I'm the Water Resources engineer uh for the city I've been with the city for about six and a half years um thank you for the invitation tonight this is really nice I think a part of this too is um part of this project is funded through Watershed funds as you might be aware um and that's Levy throughout the includes of cor so um appreciate your support on this project I hope you enjoy it and if have any questions um please let me know I'm always available thank you and Derk you came here because I'm I'm the alternate in the Watershed commission we and since uh Gunner left I've been attending as many meetings as I can unless I'm sick and and I saw Derek do this kind kind of jammed at the end of one of the Watershed meetings it felt like it got about this much of the time it deserved and I just think it's a really really cool project and I thought that folks in Quirk should know something about it well thanks and and the Watershed is very supportive of doing these projects which I think is is really helpful and they're they're mandated so we have to be doing something at the end of the day and so the more Partnerships there are I think the less burden on any one community and that that's been helpful to us here so I'll I'll go and if you have any questions please just stop me um as I roll through this I can give you the background on the timeline these projects uh take a while to put together so there's um it's going to take three or four years from kind of the Genesis of the project all the way to project completion and that's it's going to be very similar to what we're doing on the South Fork Rush Creek typically we start off with a feasibility study which is going to identify uh the practices or the parts of the project we can put together in order to reach whatever the goals are so in the case of stream Restorations like this the goals are always going to be repairing erosion or trying to improve water quality or fish habitat or macroinvertebrate habitat and these are all things that the state um Can potentially say are impaired in a stream and if you're impaired it doesn't meet the state standard it's not of high enough quality hence the mandates to do work and do improvements on these types of things so we start with the feas ility study which identifies a lot of these issues identifies the reach of the creek goes through where the status of the creek is um and what can be done to help uh improve the the quality of the resource and once we have that we're able to work with the Elm Creek Watershed and try to put this into the capital Improvement program where the Watershed will fund up to 25% the cost of a project which is a big deal um there's certainly other sources of funding that we try to try to track down and have had success doing that in the past sometimes we have more success than others but um at the end of the day um working with the Elm Creek Watershed really helped support what we're trying to do here um and the Watershed agreed to put this into their Capital Improvement program um fund a portion of the project and we enter into a Cooperative agreement with them and then we start rolling can I go back to what happened before December 2021 was this a a citizen Le request or was it staff request or for did the state say You' got this bad Waterway fix it or how did that happen good good question so a couple things came together um prior to December 2021 the state identified this reach of the creek as impaired for macroinvertebrates and for what we call Fish IBI which basically means it should have some level of fish in it and it doesn't um so we knew back then it was impaired that's a high level analysis but it's going to require once it's going to require some sort of project in the future going forward in order to mitigate for that impairment and return it to what we'll call a natural state also Downstream of this we know that there are other impaired water bodies so yeah for my brain is there a map that shows where we're talking about oh you can if you want to go to the next one just I'll just show you the map y okay here that helps me so this project is um I I'll call it Northeast of Mama G's a little bit um and it's north of 101st Avenue in Maple Grove and on this side of Interstate 94 okay and it's what we call the South Fork of Rush Creek and a portion of this P portion of corkin drains through this area too so as it makes its way to the Mississippi River ultimately thank you um the length of the creek was just over 5500 linear feet which is just over a mile um getting back to Tom's question about kind of the Genesis of it between uh residential Development coming in knowing we had this impairment and having an opportunity to try to bring this Capital Improvement forward at that time that's really where we got right before 2021 and one of the things we do try to do is do these projects before people live in the residential development because the second you do that and you go into their backyard and start changing things that's trouble um and youve maybe experience that from time to time so we want sort of the finished product when people are buying the home and so it meets their expectations and and we don't have that and they know what they're what they're getting into so hopefully that helps yeah so does the state have a list of impaired waterways and I'm guessing other nonwater ways yes and and a map of it and um there's thousands of impairments and it's a there's a lot of work to be done there's progress being made um but there's a lot of work to be done to meet the state standards some water bodies will never meet the state standard and there's going to have to be a discussion at some point about how much money you're going to actually spend trying to get get a place you probably can't get to um but those conversations will end up being for another day um but yeah so there's a lot of them and it's not just Creeks but it's Lakes a lot of lakes and that kind of thing are are impaired for various reasons and this property is city-owned it is now correct so um during the platting process um when the residential development came in developers are required to dedicate space to Parks um so at that time this is an obvious area they can't touch anyway so that's got dedicated to the city it's much more valuable to us than I think it is the developer because we can do a stream restoration and then I got some pictures too of the Regional Trail that are that goes across it eventually comes into boy close to corkran um might be just north but um Three Rivers Park District has a Regional Trail that comes through here and you might have that bra where that goes so um it's going to be a nice segment when it's all said and done super do you mind when thank you back back slide yeah I'll I'll get through the timeline and won't make this too long um but as the projects progress um and we enter into Cooperative agreements for how some of this project is going to be funded we get into the design and the back and forth on that and a final design um that's going to take several months so we've you know we're kind of getting to the point where're a year into this but it takes several months to do that um we'll bid the project out and then award a contract which we did back in July 2023 once that's awarded we can really get started on the project we had one additional item in here for an environmental assessment worksheet um which we needed to do that if you've been through those before and and reviewed those you're basically analizing the project for any significant environmental impacts but these are improvements at the end of the day and there's mandated so um they always end up in a negative declaration but it was a part of the process uh then we began Construction in the winter oftentimes the winter is a good a good time one to start tree removals and if you don't have too much Frost you can do a lot of dirt moving without creating a lot of natural resource problems and erosion and muddy mess and that type of thing so we we like doing them in the winter they can be done in the summer too but um if you get the right conditions the winter is often times the best and then for the rest of this project once we started it um it will have substantial completion um at the end of you know last fall time frame which basically means the grading work is done and the erosion control is in everything is seated and all we're really waiting for is vegetation establishment and now we're in this part of the process that's going to take a while uh we can't snap our fingers and get the vegetation where we want it it's going to take time so we have a maintenance period on that of two years so the contractor will come back for the next two years spray for weeds add more seed prep it up and at the end of 2026 time frame we would want to take it over and maintain it as the city so hopefully that helps with some of that timeline okay okay and seating is done to a state standard is it is it also is I'm a three River I'm a cassen park guy out on the Prairie and I'm wondering what what it is that restoration goes to what end we will use either a state approved mix mot has mixes that are approved um and so does the Board of Water and Soil resources and it depends on you know maybe whether it's riparian area or Upland area or shady area we might have things that we think work better um but we'll pick something that's state approved in this case we took something that was state approved and then doubled the wild flowers for a portion of this to enhance pollinator habitat it was just a very easy thing to do while we were doing there's a number of things that were easy to do while we had the space to do it um and our hope there is it's next to the trail so it would be something that's very visible the goal being if you're on the trails and you're you're going through town and coming through corkin this might be an area that looks different to you and hopefully looks nice but you notice something that's different about coming through this area there's there should be more wild flowers and grasses potentially leading to more butterflies and bees and other things if you were to stop and take a look and so we're hoping for a lot more biological diversity um and use it as an educational tool at the same time and it was easy to do it at the time we didn't do it through the whole project um but next to the trail we're really hoping for you know kind of a nice visual coming through some of the issues that came up in the feasibility study that we're trying to address are going to be this altered hydrology and habitat really just volume of water and the changing of the land from agricultural to residential and the agricultural has some drain tile in it and so we're moving water a little faster but the residential is going to hold it with storm water ponding and so things are going to change over time but damage has been done to the system um over the past we'll say 100 years and so we're going to try to fix some of that we're going to try to eliminate some excess sediment um some of that's going to be from like Banks sloughing off and eroding and falling it um other sediment is what we call the bed load which is completely normal for a stream and we would Champion the bed load we want some sediment just coming along the bottom there are microorganisms that'll use that and macro and vertebrates that use that and that's fine but in this case there's just too much sediment so we're going to try to eliminate that low dissol oxygen um resulted in these impairment for fish ibii and for macro invertebrates so we don't get enough biological diversity without the oxygen look like us these these organisms need oxygen and without it they don't survive so by adding some elements like riffles to the project we can oxygenate the water and then encourage that development of those communities um getting to the excess sediment as well we have mass wasting of stream Banks and you may have seen this in other places too but like large chunks of stream banks that just want to Slough off you get a heavy it's just the erosive processes are going on we have some pictures of that so you can get an idea of what Mass wasting is that actually adds a lot of tonnage of sediment into the stream and can create um some issues so we're going to try to eliminate that and one of the biggest things was invasive species so if you're familiar with buckthorne which you think you are um and glic mustard and re canary grass uh it was all over the place in there it's a disturbed area to some degree um but of course it isn't maintained and it's in that Suburban developed developing area so these things show up in those spaces and so a lot of it in this area it was very difficult to walk it before we did this project you you struggle to walk through the creek you couldn't walk along the creek um from top to bottom because of the amount of invasive species and really the Buckthorn um was really substantial so we have a big maintenance effort coming forward after 2026 um that's something that comes with these projects you do a mile a stream at the end of the day now you have a mile to maintain to um but I think it's going to be important to protect it from going back to Buckthorn and some other things so we'll make those efforts okay um in order to address the issues we'll repair erosion we'll use a technique um that we call to by taking some of the trees that come down with the project and reusing them in the project we'll reconnect the flood plane to the stream channel which is something that's just gets lost over time as the channel becomes ins sized and wants to to stay more channelized and spread out less um talked about the enhanced pollinator habitat and the riffles a little bit um really nice element is the bridge and Trail hope you appreciate that um and then this invasive species m going forward so lot of elements in this okay so these pictures are going to kind of wind through here as I talk but you're going to see pictures of the creek before construction and this is what a stream Bank looks like that is undergoing some Mass wasting it's losing big chunks all at once nothing else is growing on it um the plants that are growing in the bank there sloughed off from the top as the channel wants to erode this all dumps into the creek and ends up getting washed away and washed Downstream some so we want to prevent that it's creating some of the problems in the creek you can see in this one um this one was in the fall so the Buckthorn is still green um on there and as much as we love the trees and they can hold the soil in place on a creek like this that gets a large volume of water serves a big area so to speak it there's too much water at this point at the end of the day and so the trees are great and you can see the rot systems can hold a lot of sediment but there are cases where you end up with um streams and trees alongside that just can't handle it and some of those trees are big so it the bigger the tree the further away the stream probably was and gave it a chance to grow and now the stream has moved and taken the tree with it so it's often times it's hard to see it on a aerial photo but we like to use the trees as an indicator Maybe how far the stream has moved over time and so the bigger the trees the longer they were there so once they go you know we think the stream has probably moved pretty good distance over that period of time so all right keep clipping through yep we go to the next one here that's the the banks and this is a picture of what it looks like when we start to repair some of these stream Banks um we have an opportunity to go in there and regrade them we can add some rock and things to stabilize them uh the design takes into account very specific elevations on what the model says this Creek is going to bounce up to um how high these banks have to be it's wildly precise on what we need to know when that happens in order to make sure that the the creek just doesn't overflow the blanks and blast through here and ruin everything that was constructed um and we had a very at Spring where uh we did receive in this area the 30-day 100-year rainfall at one point so we talk about the 100e storm event being one storm event right well that same philosophy gets applied to a week and to a month and for this area that was over 15 Ines of rain in a month which is substantial um but it never came out of its banks and seemed to work great so we were really happy with the design by St who did the design um and surprised we didn't have a lot of repairs actually when we went back out there because none of the vegetation is established nothing is there to protect the soil if it reaches the banks so this is a vulnerable place to be so it's high off the golf course in Minneapolis um designed back in the 30s and when it rains a lot the water comes up high enough that it fills the golf course and then then the golf Turf rots and then it's floating and and you're you're saying that that won't happen here because you've taken that into consideration and designed the stream to handle that right unusual volume of water and and I would go so far to say it proved that it wouldn't happen this last spring we got kind of Lucky now if we get 10 Ines of rain in one storm like all bets are off on some of this stuff but that kind of uh rain event is something that we would hope the design has taken into account and we can avoid it up to this 100 Year anything oneyear storm fiveyear storm all that stuff if it's a 100-year event we want to make sure that the designs take that into account or we'll be doing a lot of repairs so so it it tends to look a lot better I think once you get the erosion control down I think that's always a nice time to take a picture it's kind of starting the cleanup process and there it is all right um the towood that I had mentioned earlier um this is what it looks like on the design plan and the towood isn't those black areas but the brown if you can see the brown and it looks like it's all mangled together um it's into the stream bank and the nice part about yep right there and the nice part about the tow wood is when you mangle it all in the Stream Bank it becomes very strong and a lot of stream Restorations and we're trying to do is move the highest velocity part of the stream which would might be on the outside Bend more to the middle of the channel where it can't erode the bank anymore so we're literally trying to slow the water down on the outside bank with towood and push the fastest part into the middle of the creek where it can't do any damage and then it protects it going forward um and Jessica you can hit hit that again and now it'll go through it and you can start to see I have some pictures in here of how we use to w we used it to step down from this flared end section before it came into the creek just trying to reuse the natural material but there's going to be some good pictures in here it's hard to see because there's a lot of water but there's a few things poking out of the stream on the outside Bend and that's the towood and what it's doing is it's slowing the water down in that area so it can't erode along the side of it and it's pushing the most highest velocity part of the stream back to the inside and it's creating some riffles and some Bubbles as it slows it down and forces that water to slow down in those areas and because they're underwater and there's a good picture of the towood kind of rammed up against the stream bank because it's underwater it doesn't Decay as fast so the longevity of towood is actually pretty good even though it sits in the water there's no Oxygen to help it break down and rot so it can last quite a long time and that's a really good picture of kind of what it looks like under a lower stream condition where it's just a mangle of whatever and plants will grow in there and fish can use that as habitat um over time it's going to start to fill in a little bit with sediment further protecting the bank it'll capture some things as it comes in there so it'll look different this year than it did even just last year um as it kind of matures and and gets into its normal normal state so towood is a kind of a cool tool plus we can reuse the trees um that had to be removed as a part of the project so they don't have be H awake and save on cost there's a number of reasons to do it so you placed all that wood but would that be similar to a tree falling on the bank and then becoming tow what yeah if it falls just right and you know no get there well yeah we'll reuse the trees that fall and we'll place them yeah but we don't get quite lucky enough that they land in a nice spot or they I just mean like in nature do we have this type of system like when I was thinking when trees fall that's how we would how not we but how it happens without human intervention so I would say this tries to replicate what nature would want to do yeah but it's somewhat like high powerered if you will because it's not the stream is not subjected to its natural condition anymore subjected to development egg a lot of different things at this point so in order to stabilize it it's going to take a little bit more than what nature could do in the past but that doesn't me doesn't mean we won't try natural materials if that makes sense so I think if you were to go somewhere undeveloped unpopulated yeah the trees that fall can protect the bank a lot of times they're not going to fall for a long time because there's just not enough erosive forces they've found a great habitat to live in and and they can live a long life but um in cases like this it's it's a little different so that to piece was put there yeah they how' they make it stay there so they're about uh 8 to 10 ft long and they jam it in there with a back hoe okay and they just push it push it in there so in the winter time as long as there isn't too much Frost they can push that thing in there and and and set them in so they're all about the same distance from the bank and they can do a pretty good job with it the contractor on this uh was Sun ramp construction of corkran so if you know them they they did it I've had um worked on a lot of projects with them and their work product is phenomenal it's so we were very happy when we got them um because everything is done very well at the end of the day and so yeah they it's when you watch this happen it it's not surgical let's put it that way it's blunt force instrument um and then later on it looks good but the kids love it so it looks like just something that landed in the water and yeah you know very well okay I mean 10 years ago would you you would have brought big boulders in right and we still do do but yeah the techniques have changed from just throwing rock at everything these days it's rock has its place and we had Rock in this project but if we can use natural elements um from a ecological perspective they turn out to be much better so and and then we just can reuse material that's already on site it just makes sense it's kind of look recycling cool all right so this was a really interesting part of the project something that um never been a part of before but trying to reconnect the flood plane in this area to the Stream So before the project the the creek continues to erode away and becomes ins sized and it really will struggle to get out of its banks um the banks get steeper and more straight down so as a part of the project we smooth that out and the banks are less Steep and of course the creek is much more accessible um but that gives us an opportunity to draw water off of the creek at the right elevations where there used to be historic flood plane for instance so instead of having just a linear Waterway coming through here we can let high water Escape out into little Wetland areas where it would have done that in the past um and so these were all constructed and the wet spring gave us a great opportunity to like see these little pools of wetland and where some of this water could go the biodiversity is different in the Wetland area than it is in the creek you're going to get some different things going on so this just sort of doubles um the ecological value of the creek never really been able to do this before some of the other projects I've worked on um we're going between homes and we don't have space and we're trying to save so many trees and we can't take trees down to build something like this and so um but in this case we had the space we had this area is 14 acres in size so being able to kind of blend that flood plane reconnective back into this project was something that um was totally new to me but looks really looked really good actually when it was completed so um excited to see what happens this spring okay uh talk a little bit about the H pollinator habitat in the back right you can see the new bridge is installed right under that town home um and so I got some better pictures of of the bridge but um the idea here was to put the enhanced pollinator habitat right next to the bridge um to create showy something showy and different so that's why we did it it has just been seated at this point so nothing's growing um which was a bummer but we'll see what happens in the spring and then this area not not really a part of the project but kind of a part of the project it's adjacent to about four to six acres of a well matured Forest 80-year-old Forest just to the left um got a lot of Buckthorn in it but the DNR provided us a grant to restore the forest so we can go in there and we're going to take the Buckthorn out probably take out Ash um maybe like Elm some things that are susceptible to disease that we don't want in there and plant some other things back in there but then recreate this Forest one of the things that is hard to come by in a Suburban environment is like a nice natural Forest to walk through it's like hard to find cuz like the Buckthorn takes over um and so this will give us a chance near the trail and we threw some wood chips down and kind of will lead people back in there and they can kind of go wherever they want I suppose but um it'll give people a chance to experience at least four acres then of like a natural forest in a suburban area so kind of right between our communities right like our residents will be able to jump on the trail and I don't know if they want to walk back there and whatever experience the forest hopefully is all they're doing but I think at the end of the day we don't get a lot of it and so Forest preservation was just we kind of fell into it at the end of the day and took advantage of it so we should be setting up a big burn pile this winter and they should be taking the stuff down um hopefully next week they they burn the Buckthorn and get some of that out of there and then next spring we can plant trees back in there and start doing maintenance so um hoping it's really nice we just kind of got lucky with that is there any interest in I mean part of my yard was farm field until probably 70 years ago and and they just stopped farming it and so then what comes in there but it was it was uh box elder and and some other pretty weedy sorts of trees well now you know the Box Elder is all gone and it unfortunately it's Ash and but it's also cherry and and Basswood and some Maples and some Oaks and so but it is a long process um is there any is that you're just going to put in a climax Forest Long Live trees that that no no no no box Elders going to be PL you guys won't plant box Elders no actually your spot on because we'll put Cherry Basswood Maple Oak if we can do it they're a little harder to get going but um try to put that all back in what is already in that forest and apparently this also was an area that maybe had like apple trees because there's a couple apple trees in there so we're just going to save those and see what happens because they could look nice in the spring but um if you were to look at aerial photos from 80 years ago there's a few spotty trees and now it's a forest and so the oldest trees in there are pushing 100 years old at this point um which is a nice asset to keep and it's area that's probably worthless to most people but if your Parks you know and your public works and some of these places you want these areas because you just don't get them all the time so hoping for that excitement and then here's some of the riffles that we put in um high water so sometimes they're hard to see um I don't know if you can start this one over or not kind of ran away from me a little bit um but the riffles are just um like a cobble placed across the bottom of the stream and these are adding that dissolved oxygen to help keep the right amount of oxygen for the macro brates and the fish and to try to eliminate this impairment and so there's a number of these where we've got Cobble across the bottom and they kind of Step the creek down they're little bit of grade control but it's pretty flat in there so we didn't need a lot of like what I'd call grade control as the creek goes from one end to the other um but they do add that nice Babbling Brook feature to it so our expectation is that people will be able to walk off the trail it'll be able to walk like right up right up the creek if they want I mean it doesn't matter um and they can see the Babbling Brook and kind of see how this is is put together and again the hope is that it looks different um than than some of the other things that are around we were out there last fall we took the Maple Grove Lake quity commission out there and there was already a number of butterflies had come into the area and different um insects had started to show up and bees and things and so those those types of organisms are kind of starve for Habitat a little bit if you will um and so when they get a space like this often times they just glom onto it which is why we're really hoping the pollinator habitat looks different um when I was in Plymouth I did a probably what amounted to a 400 foot Shoreline Restoration in a park it really wasn't much but we put basically pollinator plants in there um and there happened to be a bench there and by the time those started to bloom the butterflies and the bees were all over the place in there he felt kind of bad for him like they had nowhere else to go you know but you could tell it was something that they Val and so when I think of projects like these I kind of think you know there's room here for for something which was kind of nice and we're not I mean we're just taking advantage of something that kind of fell to us in some ways right the land was going to develop we needed the park space anyway we had this Creek right this we're just we just rolled with it um and ended up with a mile long stream so we feel pretty good about that okay thanks and here's the bridge um and whenever this connects up and and does its thing um we have the trails paved on either side of it like into the development um over to the Hindu temple if you know where that is is all paved um I don't know Three Rivers Trail plan like when all these connections get made I mean you might have that in your head I don't know exactly what trail this is uh if it's the Diamond Lake or not the Diamond Lake the lake Independence Regional Trail that FL I don't know what they call it but I don't think it's part of the Diamond Lake Regional Trail I yeah and I this stuff is often times 20 years out like they know they want the land for it but they don't want to build the trail until they have so many miles is my understanding we're working through a Cooperative agreement with them for Trails y Cooperative agreement about so it's good and I think um but as these Trails come together they'll be a really nice a really nice segment all the way from corkran through Maple Grove and then over to the Elm Creek Park Reserve should be able to have all that connection eventually okay that trail is actually just North up in Rogers but used to be uh used to be hasset oh does okay yeah yeah just almost in quir CR so it's close it's close we're going to we're going to getting our own through Trail yeah put a little stub in there and jump on yeah um so it it'll it'll be pretty nice it'll be a long time coming it'll feel like that but when it's done I I really think that um it'll be a unique Trail so that's the trail um some of the details um the the project is probably going to be about $2 and5 million over four or five years probably by the time we're done building things and getting everything squared away I do want to go back in there and there's some Buckthorn that was just outside of the area that we were working so I would like to go in there and clean some of that stuff up and maybe put some other plants in there so that we don't I mean I don't really want it next to this project don't wreck it right yeah don't wreck it exactly I want to wreck it get out of here so stay out so we'll we'll try to do that um the funding partners are are kind of up there and keep in mind you know anything from the Watershed is levied across the whole Watershed so every time you see Watershed project that includes corkran um and everybody else who's a part of the Watershed and the watersheds are great Partners um we got some money from the Board of Water and Soil resources through what they call their watershed based implementation funding funny on this project this is what's funny about this project so this project is kind of Po popular compared to other projects that I do um initially Bowser turned us down for Grant and we applied and told him we're going do all these great things and they said no and I was stunned um but they went a different direction and after we kind of got going a little bit then this funding became available and and Bowser was a lot more interested at that time so so we appreciated that um because we'll take all the partners we can get and then they ended up writing up a nice article on it as well um that went out um kind of Statewide to State Partners um and then it just got published last week in a national magazine article the apwa reporter um which is really nice and kind of combine the development with the project but it it was really nice to get that recognition so I actually sent that over to Judy she might have emailed that today to everybody you probably have a link in their um to that and then this DNR Grant um to do the forest part of it um really inexpensive compared to the rest of it in order to get four acres of restoration I think at the end of the day but um feel really good about feel really good about adding that in so we're glad to do that and then the tidbits on design engineer stantech and local companies sunram did the project and they do a lot of great work and and then there's the funding so thank you for supporting the project really I mean that really cool so did Maple Grove provide any any Earth moving any any of the any of that project or or as part of your public works department or is that completely separate completely separate it's best to keep it separate um getting two groups in there working on top of each other lends itself to I think some issues if one of them has to own it then it seems to go smoother at the end of the day for sure so how was that this this great project tied into uh the the 610 Bridge that's going to ending 610 and coming down to County Road 30 because that's all been chewed up and is being spit out in a little different format so that's a good question so this is going to be North just north of that y so the landale lane which is the segment that runs north south there will come almost right into this project okay um so when when that is done and then the 610 extension runs south of that to the east and west there is a segment of the South Fork of Rush Creek just south of this that I would also be interested in doing a restoration on um so I'm trying to get in the Elm Creek CIP for that but it'll have to wait for development that one is going to be a little bit tricky because there are homes on the west side and it's egg on the the right on the east side the development side so the extent to which we can work with the homeowners um remains to be seen just in my experience the change is always difficult for the homeowner and so we've got to see what we can do there we're probably going to be limited we're not that interested in you know upsetting anybody or anything like that but we do have the east side we can work on which includes some City Park property and a future Trail possibly going through there so we we have some room to work so it' be nice to actually complete the segment those homeowners own right up to the creek or virtually theek they do their property lines are like the middle of the creek like it's platted that way and so it's it it's okay I mean we we're happy to work with them and if we can do something in there we'll do something and if they want to pass they can pass um but but we'll have an opportunity to at least try because it's similar to this segment hope they'll look at the at the at the work that you've done and say you know this is really good would enhance the value of our properties yeah they're either going to go that looks great I love it or they're going to be like are you kidding me so it'll go one way or the other for sure but one other Technique we can do too instead of like removing trees completely is just to try to trim them up like we need the sun is the problem right at the end of the day I need the Sun so we can grow some of the plants um and sometimes trimming the trees might be enough to to help make that work and then they can keep the tree so maybe there's a compromise there um but we're always happy to take out you know Ash and things that might be susceptible to disease anyway and save them five grand on that removal so we'll see that's the next one cool really cool the funding so the City Maple Grove did is that coming from their Parks fund do you know no no okay should though don't you think that comes from so we have a I'm not sure if you have it here we have a surface surface water utility fee storm water fee um and so our our contributions would generally come from that fund and then we also have trunk storm sewer fees that have been collected over time so as properties have developed um they've been assessed trunk storm sewers so that we can least drain the yards and the the roads at some point so that we have funding there to do these stream Restorations as well if they're big enough so um trunk storm funds don't last for forever that's limited people pay that one time and then after that any maintenance upgrades repairs can't be can't be um funded from that so you can get that one one time so um we couldn't do maintenance with that that fund we'll use our storm water fee for that at this point and then how does the Watershed get their money Tom you probably know that too yeah so they do an ad like they call it an ad valorum Levy so um they'll hold a public Hearing in September of each year for for whatever projects they want to Levy for and then they make a request of hennipen County to Levy those funds on people's property taxes so they can't do it directly but they can make the request um and henpen County's never refused the request um so is that something that then they would V on like it go to vote or no it's just yep they'll vote on it and yeah it's all part of Truth and Taxation so if you look on your property tax bill there's other taxing districts or special taxing districts it's in there and in there is like probably met council is in there Three Rivers is in there the Watershed is in there and you'll see what you pay individually to the Watershed in Elm it might be $10 a year yeah something like that in the levy interesting now we've got a we've got a we've got a creek and quirin the the one that runs through city park that looks a lot like the before picture yeah yeah it's just the way I mean that's just the N it's just the natural way things have gone you know and sunam lives right across from that Creek driving c h yeah got to get with the water shed start rolling so this just happens to our Creeks over time because of invasive species and construction yeah and I would just say like just if you want to like simplify it down to the Creeks are not in their The Watershed is no longer natural for what the creek developed in originally for just people living here and whatever you know and so a practices and development all changes that um what we end up with is more volume of water being pushed into the creek faster and then that's what causes it and then once things start to erode and the soil becomes exposed the invasive species take off yeah so how do you remove the Buckthorn you pull it or you cut it and treat it um in this case we cut it all down um but does it go back it will so now we got to go back in and we're going to have to be treating it going forward and it's going to be a battle because it was so thick in there so we know that's coming um I mean hopefully over time it's just not that big of a deal but we'll maintain we'll probably be out there twice a year up and down seating knocking back invasive species keeping things from taking off and eventually want to be in a good place where we don't have to do quite as much maintenance but um we'll be very cautious not to let it get away from us as well is there ever any concern that the new development like the home say fertilizer from the yard runoff will impact the species or the Ecology of the stream yeah yeah yeah so and anything they do about it or um not much you can do yeah it's a great question because yes the development's going to drive more what we'll say we'll call pollutants into the stream and we have to combat it now the development has storm water ponding and filtration systems that are designed to clean that water before it gets there um so in theory you've knocked that back more than it's coming forward um some of the pollutants that we would be concerned like geese would be one of the things that we might have to battle we we don't need goose poop out there um but this is the kind of area that geese would like grass clippings in the street would be another phosphorous Laden thing just keeping keeping those on the yard it can be huge um but we do have significant buffer out here like it's with 14 acres we have a big space so we're not expecting a lot of pollutants to be able to find their way across the ground but it's going to be to your point I think what goes into the pond and what comes out of the pond at the end of the day is going to come right into the creek so we should have fish in there soon then yeah if I go drop a not sure right from the bridge yeah there we go it's an interesting creep cuz the two October earlier the last October I can't remember when it was it was completely dry and we had been in a drought and we walked the creek literally literally the bottom of the creek um and so it was very easy to walk because there was no Buckthorn in the water um but there's a lot of uh appliances tired there's a lot after 100 years there's just a lot in there um but with these projects we take that stuff out to part of the rural character that used to be girl of things so but it's nice to get that stuff out of there too so was all of this probably Big Woods back before before Europeans got here yeah I don't know the answer to that I think the maps might suggest that it could have been like Big Woods I don't think anybody would know for sure you know some of the first things that happened where the trees went down right so um I don't know about the Big Woods but and the stand that we're trying to protect isn't Big Woods it's not too new yeah it's too too new um but as as far as a mature Forest it'll be one of the more mature forests in the area you know a stand Forest that big so it's nice to have it so you go into that Big Woods and cut down all the Buckthorn and leave the good stuffff yeah I mean it's got to be hard hard project yeah so yeah I don't have to do it myself so um it will be a hard project and we'll replant species we think we're going to end up with some voids in the canopy by the time we're done taking down the Ash and the Buckthorn so that's why we're going to come back and plant in a few dozen trees back in to fill that canopy back up um but yeah I I suspect the larger Buckthorn some of them six Ines in diameter maybe like they're old school Buckthorn those will get hacked off and burned on the burn pile uh the rest of it can be mowed with a forestry mower I think anything less than 4 in technically can be mowed with a forestry okay um so they'll be able to mash that up but we'll run into the same problem what thr's going to be growing back up in a year and so we're going to be out there doing maintenance for a while okaying yeah anytime I one takeaway is anytime you do something like this you got to plan on you're in it for the long haul and the maintenance it' just be a shame for it to revert back to a state where it needs huge fix you sort of assume that your beautiful Prairie is going to have a fair number thistles in there yep yep yep yeah I mean soon as you turn the dirt over right the invasives want to be the first thing that grows so we'll get all kinds of stuff in there I heard that quatin Aspen can out compete sometimes the the invasives yeah so it's good to know yeah there you go yeah just fixed a project section they all die off it's a good tip for sure oh well thank you for everything yeah thank you for having I really appreciate the invitation and having me out um I hope you like it you know it's a it's a corkran project too so appreciate all the support on it and appreciate your work at the Watershed and he still wants someone to fill in his spot if anyone's interested we have we're all thinking about it thank Youk you apprciate apprciate have a good night I do need a motion to adjourn so moved a second second all right all those in favor all right all and motion passes Med and jour