Long Lake is not the only Ramsey County Lake dealing with Aquatic Invasive Species (AIS).  As a result, the lake associations within the county are banding together to approach the county for support in remediation.

LLIA President, Rich Kusick, attended the Ramsey County AIS Task Force Meeting on May 4th, which was also attended by Ramsey County Representative, Connie Bernardy.  This year, Ramsey County receives $98,472 from the State of MN for AIS Prevention Aid.     

Since the AIS Prevention Program’s inception in 2014, Mike Goodnature of Ramsey County Park & Rec Dept. had been overseeing the program and distribution of funds.  In 2017, the County decided to hire a full-time employee, Michelle Prosser, to oversee the program and funds.  With this, they decided to form a “Task Force” to help determine what should be done and where the funding should be used.   They no longer are giving money to each lake association to use at their discretion for AIS education and prevention.  The County is keeping the money and will be outsourcing/hiring monitors to be at the County’s boat ramps as well as looking for volunteers to fill in the gaps.  Previous year’s cost per hour for monitoring was $10-12 per hour.  With the new program, the County has decided to outsource the training and scheduling of monitors at a cost of $18 per hour.  As you can see, starting with $98K, paying a new full-time government employee to oversee the program and then raise the cost of monitoring 50% for outsourcing it, there isn’t much money left to do anything else.  There was also a discussion regarding the increased need for education and prevention of other AIS such as Starry Stonewort and Flower Rush.  They are also very disruptive AIS and need to educate and prevent them from spreading into our lakes.  http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/aquaticplants/index.html

We thought the task force was going to have some input on how the money was going to be budgeted and hoping to get some for AIS treatment.  Unfortunately, we really have no say in budgeting and they were looking for the task force to help the new director, Michelle Prosser, with new ideas and running the program.  There is NO money available to be used for any treatment.

Long story short, we will need to find other sources of grants and cost sharing on our own.  LLIA, along with other lakeshore associations, are working on coordinating an effort to work together to come up with ideas of where to find these funds.  All lakeshore representatives were in agreement that each lake association shouldn’t have to come up with their own ideas of innovative treatments and funding sources.  Seems like we’re each being asked to re-invent the wheel and we’re not specialists in the field.  There was agreement that this should ultimately be a State funded and managed program for all lakes in the state/county.