Posted on December 28, 2017
By Joe Ahlquist, Post-Bulletin
When Willard Drysdale opened his mail one day in mid-May, he didn’t think about being in the center of the year’s biggest story in Wabasha County, or in the southeastern Minnesota region. He simply thought about his farm.
Drysdale Farms, a stone’s throw from U.S. Highway 61 just north of Kellogg, along with the neighborhood of River Drive South in Wabasha became rallying points in fight against the St. Paul District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its 40-year dredge material management plan for Lower Pool 4 on the Mississippi River.
The draft plan called for the Corps to acquire 298 acres of the Drysdale farm, the 16-acre Southside Fitzgerald site and a handful of other sites in both Wisconsin and Minnesota that the current landowners did not wish to sell. Landowners and the public balked.
The Drysdale family has farmed the land since 1939, and Willard Drysdale hopes to someday turn the family farm over to his daughter, Chelsey. So when a 153-page document just showed up, unannounced, on his doorstep telling him the Corps wanted his land, Drysdale decided to fight back.
He called the Corps, expressing his concern with the plan. “I told the fella it’s not for sale,” Drysdale said. Then Chelsey started writing letters to anyone — lawmakers, the county, the Corps — she thought might be able to help.
Over the course of the summer, the Corps extended its public comment period four times while it dealt with the fallout over the draft plan. Lawmakers ranging from Democratic U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken to GOP U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis toured the Drysdale farm and the Fitzgerald site along River Drive South — a site where the Corps planned to run about 200 trucks of sand per day about two to three months of the year — with the same message: The Corps’ plan needs to be fixed.
Through it all, staff from the city and county of Wabasha worked with organizations from the Corps, the Wisconsin and Minnesota Departments of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and experts in trucking, barge traffic and mining to develop a better plan.
As of today, the Corps is working to respond to all the comments and suggestions it received during the lengthy public comment period. It expects to release a revised draft plan next spring, said Patrick Moes, spokesman for the St. Paul District of the Corps of Engineers. “There were many, many comments on the initial draft (plan),” Moes said. “We have to answer each one of those, and it’s taking more time than anticipated,” he said.
Col. Sam Calkins, commander of the Corps in St. Paul, said the new draft plan will almost certainly have changed significantly enough to require a new public comment period this spring. While he cannot say what that new plan will look like — it is still being developed by the Corps — it most likely will resemble a suggestion from the stakeholders in Wabasha.
“We’re pretty confident we won’t have to purchase farmland or land in direct vicinity to residential property,” Calkins said.
As for the original draft plan, Calkins said as the public comments began rolling in, that plan became “difficult to defend.” One of the problems, he said, was the plan was rolled out without holding one-on-one discussions with property owners and getting that advance buy-in from the community.
The Corps got it “drastically wrong,” Calkins said. “And we should have done a better job emphasizing it was a draft plan.”
Source: Post-Bulletin
