I missed this article a couple weeks ago by Joe Knight.
Quote:
Little Wissota makes list of impaired lakes
By Joe Knight
Leader-Telegram staff
About one-third of the phosphorus being dumped into Little Lake Wissota through Paint Creek and Stillson Creek needs to eliminated, according to a draft plan just released from the Department of Natural Resources.Little Lake Wissota, which suffers from frequent algae blooms, is on an Impaired Waters list for lakes that don’t meet federal and state water quality standards.
The list includes Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, Lake Menomin and Lake Tainter in Dunn County, Mead Lake in Clark County, Otter Lake in Chippewa County and Lake Wissota’s Moon Bay.
The federal Clean Water Act requires the state to identify these polluted waters, then develop a plan for improving them, explained Ken Schreiber, a DNR watershed expert.
The plans are called Total Maximum Daily Load because they determine the level of pollutants a lake can tolerate daily and still meet water quality standards.
“We recognize this is not going to make it pristine, but it will make it noticeably better than it is right now,” Schreiber said.
Dropping the phosphorus by 30 percent would mean at least another month of clear water in the summer before the lake turned green, he said.
Little money is available for cost-sharing with landowners on conservation practices, but the county would do what it could, said Chippewa County Conservationist Dan Masterpole.
“We’ll be working towards that over the next few years, but there’s practical problems. The state’s broke and getting broker,” Masterpole said.
The county also is facing difficult budget cuts, he said.
In the past a state priority watershed program funded county staff to work with landowners in a targeted watershed, and it supplied cost-sharing for conservation practices that kept sediments and nutrients out of waterways. That program is gone and hasn’t been replaced, he said.
Schreiber said the old priority watershed program did a good job of cleaning up streams but wasn’t always as good about cleaning the green in impoundments like Little Lake Wissota.
The problem is that too much phosphorus if being put on fields in the Paint Creek and Stillson Creek watersheds, he said. The nutrients end up in the creeks rather than fertilizing the fields, and they cause Little Lake Wissota to turn greener faster, he said.
“A lot of these soils already have elevated phosphorus levels, but they’re still adding to it,” Schreiber said.
A more scientific application of phosphorus fertilizer, based on soil testing, would help, he said.
“Nutrient management is not very sexy. It generally does not get much play, but there’s way too much phosphorus being dumped on these fields,” Schreiber said.
Masterpole estimated that around one-fifth of the agricultural land in the watershed is in a nutrient management plan.
Although funding for land conservation is scarce, the federal farm bill still has some money for vegetative buffers along streams that filter nutrients and are good for wildlife, he said.
“Probably the most cost-effective thing we can do is work with landowners to restore wetlands in the watershed and install buffers and work on nutrient management programs, he said.
“We’re going to be entering a time here where people may be asked to do more on their own and not have a lot of well-funded initiatives,” Masterpole said.
