From the Duluth News Tribune, by Janna Goerdt
They look like rivers, running through the lowlands of Sax, Zim and Meadowlands.
The hundreds of miles of ditches crisscrossing the Sax-Zim area were dug in the early 1900s so farmers could create usable fields out of the bogs and wetlands. The deep, wide ditches helped drain water away from the fields.
As family farms waned, so did the ditches.
Today, some of the abandoned ditches in St. Louis County are being eyed as an environmental treasure.
Instead of drying up, an abandoned ditch tends to fill in with sediment and vegetation. It can then become something much more valuable to the county and state government -- new wetlands.
The St. Louis County Board voted Tuesday to officially close two branches of Ditch Six in McDavitt Township northwest of Duluth, though after decades of little or no maintenance they were ditches in name only.
Closing the ditches will add 333 acres of wetlands, valued at about $8,000 an acre for replacement purposes, to the county's wetland credit bank.
As wetlands are nibbled away by road development, state law dictates that they be replaced by new or restored wetlands.
The problem, said St. Louis County Commissioner Dennis Fink, is that "we are running out of high land to develop to support our tax base." Using any of that property to replace wetlands can be an economic challenge.
At the heart of the decision is a fundamental shift in how wetlands are viewed -- from a soggy nuisance to a sought-after resource.
"Agencies are looking for opportunities to replace wetlands that have been lost," said Tom Tri, environmental project manager with the county Public Works Department.
"One of the options we are looking at is plugging some of those ditches to make wetlands again. We are looking at (closing) a couple other sites, on a preliminary basis," Tri said, though he would not say how many miles of ditches would be closed, nor where they are located.
In St. Louis County, 10 to 25 acres of wetlands are destroyed each year by county construction projects. New wetlands can be credited to county, township or state road projects only, Tri said.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation will need many acres of replacement wetlands for the Highway 53 expansion north of Virginia.
And while Tri emphasizes that the county is not interested in filling all ditches -- he says that would be impossible, and many ditches are still needed to keep homes, roads and forests dry -- some ditches are appropriate for conversion.
Tom Malterer, peat program director for the University of Minnesota's Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth, has been working to restore peat-based wetlands since the early 1990s.
He described an experimental process used to restore some wetlands, in which the top layer of vegetation and seed is scraped off a "donor" bog and spread over a new area. Over several years, the vegetation grows and spreads to create a restored wetland.
"There is a lot of support for this," Malterer said. "Nearly everyone in the public sector realizes that the county and the state need wetland credits, and this is an opportunity to create those credits without taking land out of the county's tax base."
Some of the widest ditches, which can stretch more than 20 feet across, would be impractical to close.
Many smaller ditches, however, haven't been maintained for nearly 90 years and are all but indistinguishable from surrounding wetlands.
Such is the case with one of the two three-quarter-mile-long ditches to be closed. Those ditches are bordered by land owned by the University of Minnesota and a Nevada company once interested in mining peat.
People who have a ditch bordering their property can petition to have the ditch cleaned out, though they would be responsible for the cost, said Jeff Goetzman, resident engineer for the Public Works Department in southern St. Louis County.
He is a member of the recently re-established ditch committee, which will meet to sort out which ditches are still important to area landowners and how to maintain them.
"But if it costs thousands of dollars to clean out a ditch, and people aren't depending on that field for their livelihood, it's hard to justify spending that kind of money," Goetzman said.
