The City of Crookston held an open house on Monday to introduce its new Stormwater Master Plan. The plan was presented by Travis McStraw of AE2S Engineering, who has been working with the city on this plan for over a year.
Last year, the city conducted a stormwater resilience study and received community feedback on areas of the city more prone to flooding and on how water moves through the city. The study was conducted after Crookston was awarded a Climate Resilience Planning Grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).
McStraw broke his presentation down to three parts: developing the master plan, flood fight operations, and the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit The plan includes a full model of the city’s stormwater system, which will help the public works department identify problem areas to address and keep the city up-to-date on drain locations and pipe sizes, whichwill help the department keep up with efficiency. “Having the storm system documented and cataloged is a great feature to add to our GIS system,” said Public Works Director Chuch Getsman. “We can literally just pull it up, click on this area, you know, whatever street, and figure out what size the storm lines are running through there, and then with some formulas, we can figure out, okay, if we have this much rainfall, we can figure out how many gallons are going to be running through there. Do we need to update it? Is it sized perfectly? So, yeah, it’s a lot. It’s going to be a data-driven process.”
For flood-fighting procedures, McStraw and his team faced the challenge of the Red Lake River, which snakes through the entire city, so they developed different scenarios to ensure plans could be developed to help alleviate pressure on the city’s levee system.
The MS4 program is a federally required program that identifies and reduces stormwater pollution. The city must be MS4-compliant by 2028, and the stormwater plan was identified as the ideal opportunity to file and prepare the city’s MS4 permit for the 2028 deadline. A critical portion of the program is a reliable and consistent funding mechanism, and McStraw suggested that the city look into creating a stormwater utility, which would be a slight add-on to water utility bills to keep the MS4 program going. When asked by the council what it might cost taxpayers, McStraw estimated about six dollars per month on average. “In the end, whether it’s a utility or not, that’s the council’s decision, and there’ll be a lot of public opportunity to comment and discuss that with them,” McStraw said. “We have really great council members. I think they all had really great questions tonight, and as a team, we’re going to tackle this together and get Crookston up and running with the new program.”
As the plan has developed, public feedback has been an important part of the process, and McStraw and city officials received additional feedback from residents at Monday’s meeting, which will help as the plan is finalized over the next few months. “Public feedback is so important. Anytime we do engineering analysis, or models, especially, you know, anybody can model, but hearing the residents be able to tell us what they see every day, that’s what really makes the analysis worthwhile,” said McStraw. “And so, being able to compare what they see versus what we’re simulating in the program, and being able to help those two match better. They’ve got boots on the ground, they see this stuff happen every day, and they’re the best informants an engineer could have.”
Following the open house, the MS4 permit will be finalized and submitted to the state for approval, and AE2S will continue working with city officials to identify the best path forward regarding a possible stormwater utility.
