Minnesota Counties Concerned About 50% cut in AIS Funding

Tit for Tat Steve, I think you would be justified tossing a few clumps of Milfoil in the lake.

Riverrat wrote:

Seems like we need more education. Lots more education. Pulling in clumps of zebra mussels and losing hundreds in tackle sucks. When there’s a thousand lakes in your county you can guarantee it’s not a bunch of rich people that are the cause of the concern for invasive species. Around here regular Joe still has a year round lake house. It’s not the birds I’m worried about adding milfoil to the lakes and rivers I fish, It’s arrogant city folk that don’t think that the water in their bilge and livewells with little chunks of weeds and creatures aren’t going to make the problem worse, because it cant get worse. It can. Most of the lakes in my area are real shallow, milfoil would make access impossible. It would be a shame to have to rename the Red River the Crystal Clear Canadian River because we give up on trying to prevent further damage.

This a great example of the ignorance I mentioned earlier.

I’ve seen more destruction to fisheries by lake associations spraying weeds than by AIS. Many of the lakes don’t even have Eurasian milfoil. Some of them the weeds don’t even grow shallow where people swim. Some of them were never weedy lakes to begin with. It amazes me that our dnr allows people to dump chemicals in the lakes to kill the weeds. Just proves, money talks.

Ive seen plenty of fish kill from farm field run off too. There are many cases of toxic algae blooms killing ecosystems from excess nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. But let’s thank a farmer right?

I’m not saying AIS funding is what it should be, but if we’re going to paint with a broad brush lets call out everybody!

Sorry but I don’t trust anyone or anything when it comes to government and money. As a new lake home owner, I attended my first lake association meeting. There they had a speaker from an Ely based clean water lobbying group, there to solicit funds for their group. The guy was interesting but cited that a lakeshore owner with grass up to the lake is responsible for 3# of phosphorus every year into the lake. I pointed out that for 15 years or so, Minnesota has banned phosphorous in lawn fertilizer, so where does it come from? The answer was, well it blows in from the dust from South Dakota and western Minnesota. My response was, interesting, so it only falls on green grass that abuts the lake? I understand natural lake shore buffers, my whole shoreline in native plants and trees but the “sky is falling”, we need money to stop it is getting to be a broken record. My annual association dues are modest however I donate the maximum amount toward AIS funding for the lake, have every year. In the meantime we now have seen our first year of serious zebra mussel infestation and they have found starry stonework in the lake. The weed can be treated but the zebs, well I guess we will be blessed with even more clear water. It’s sort of like the tornado that came through last June, I still got a mess, but what can you do. Yes education is important but the lake association put up a red flag on this AIS spending cuts. Well when they were spending it didn’t do much good on our lake, just saying.