Mississippi Corridor Neighborhood Coalition (MCNC)
http://mcnc-mpls.org/

About the organization
MCNC works to preserve, protect, enhance and restore the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, and to serve the interests of neighborhood residents and others who value and respect our Great River.

Respondent: Randy Kouri, president

How important to you is the river or stream nearest your home, and why?
The Mississippi River is a local, regional and national resource for drinking water, habitat, and recreation and as a host to biological diversity that is unparalleled. As current stewards, we have to preserve and protect its ecosystem for ourselves and for future generations. We cannot take it for granted or allow pollution from any source to impair it.

How can citizens find out about the condition of the river nearest their homes or communities?
There are local and federal agencies that would have information like the DNR, Minneapolis Environmental Management, MPCA, or EPA. However, the information is often disjointed and not viewed from an overall sustainability standpoint but more of a land developmental planning standpoint.

Local groups working on river reclamation also are a good source of information and offer an opportunity to get involved in the local watersheds.

What can homeowners do to make their land and property more river friendly? What can farmers do? Business owners?
Avoiding the use of chemicals, planting native plants, keeping garbage and plant material out of the storm sewers and following water conservation methods are all good starting points for homeowners. Farmers can follow conservation methods such as leaving wetlands alone, using organic farming techniques and preventing runoff from manure piles. Businesses have a responsibility to the community to use the latest technology to keep pollutants out of the air, water and soil and to follow the same conservation methods as homeowners by avoiding chemical lawn treatments and preventing runoff.

Residents, farmers, and business owners need to know the facts. Education is the starting point to realizing any type of change.

What are the most important actions citizens can take to help clean up Minnesota's rivers?
As voters and taxpayers, citizens can insist that their elected representatives and regulatory agency staff strictly enforce current laws, including the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, and related state and local statues and ordinances. We also need better transportation options and investment in preserving our natural resources. We probably already have the tools needed to protect the environment and human health, but we do not have the political will to make it happen. Citizens need to get involved.

On an individual basis, citizens can make better choices for transportation, housing, recreation and even where they shop. Each person making a few lifestyle changes can, collectively, make a huge difference in how we use our resources and what affect it has on our environment.

What are policymakers doing to enhance the current and future health of Minnesota's rivers? What should they be doing?
At all levels of policymaking, we are falling behind in protecting our waterways. More than 30 years since the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, we still have impaired waters and find ourselves retreating from these landmark acts. Minnesota used to be one of the most progressive states with regard to "quality of life" issues, but now we have cutbacks in environmental protection programs that have helped to make Minnesota an attractive state for tourism as well as for its own residents. We need bipartisan leadership that recognizes the value of our waterways and other natural features and works to protect them.

River policymakers must address diverse and often competing elements such as the environment, commerce, flood control, recreation, and land use—but from your point of view, what overarching values should guide how we use, treat, and manage rivers?
Lets be honest about the true condition of the river. Lets be brave and do an inventory of all plant and animal life along the river as a baseline for protection of our natural environment and sustainability for future generations. Lets begin to take the responsible steps to do everything we can toward ensuring the sustainability of our city, state, and also of our country's greatest natural resource, the Mississippi River.

"Competing elements" all need to be subject to one compelling principle: protection of the natural elements must come first, and everything else follows. To do otherwise is to condemn future generations to clean up our mess - and it may be too late by then.

How can we manage the conflict of private land use and the best management practices for our rivers?
Working to build better relationships with private owners, educate businesses along the river ways, offer tree plantings, ponding, filtering.

Homeowners have been required to make significant changes in their habits over the past couple of decades because of regulations regarding everything from burning leaves to disposing of old paint. It was a combination of education and regulatory enforcement. "Private" land use is a myth; no one truly "owns" the land; we are just temporary stewards. If we can begin to make that clear to people, perhaps we can change both their attitudes and their behaviors.

How important is the development of a land-use plan in the watersheds that feed our rivers? Do you have a land-use plan?
Land use plans chiefly focus on land development. The rivers are not a priority. Even with the current Upper River Master Plan in Minneapolis, the focus is on the available land development areas. The plan has very little "green" or developmental focus of any kind that puts the river as the top priority.

The Mississippi Corridor Neighborhood Coalition produced its award-winning Conceptual River Corridor Plan in 1995. It was the first plan that was neighborhood based and, among other recommendations, suggested that until there was the political will to reclaim the river as a natural amenity, it would not happen. Since then, the city adopted its own upper river land use plan, Above the Falls, with little attention to ecosystem restoration. This is the city's last chance to do what is right for the river, but it remains to be seen if it has the vision to do so.

When we engage in land use planning (or any other planning for that matter) we have to take a systems approach. We cannot isolate housing from environmental protection, or transportation from economic development, or energy self sufficiency from affordable housing design. We have come to a point when sustainability is no longer the domain of environmentalists, but a key principle for our survival.

What programs are available—and are more needed—to educate and inform citizens, river users, river property owners, and policymakers about river issues?
Current education programs do not reach most people, whether urban or rural. Innovative approaches need to be explored.

More resources have to be committed to public education, and the public needs to be encouraged to become more involved in public policy. People need to become reconnected to their natural environment before they can work to protect it. Policy makers have done a disservice to the public by demeaning the work of environmental activists and others working to preserve our resources. They also have discounted sound scientific evidence, some coming from their own staff research, which dictates changes in the way we think about and use our resources. Equally guilty is the mass media that gives scant attention to environmental issues. Why is there no "environmental" section of the newspaper? Why is it that the only significant reporting of environmental issues is found on public radio and television?

How does Mississippi River quality change as it flows from the headwaters to the Twin Cities and beyond? What is Minnesota's accountability to the states that have to treat, filter, and use the water after it leaves Minnesota?
The river quality is definitely degraded by the time it reaches the cities' boundaries from its birth at the headwaters. The waters have had almost 500 miles of influences; by the time the river starts meandering through Minneapolis at the 694 bridge. Add the industrially zoned riverbanks and runoffs of the "big cities", another 165 miles before leaving Minnesota, and the Mississippi is well on it's way to being undrinkable, unswimmable, and unfishable before leaving the state.

Yet the Mississippi is where Minneapolis/St.Paul pulls millions of gallons of drinking water from every day.

There are 5 unseparated storm sewers in Minneapolis that cause millions of tons of raw sewage to spew into the river with as little as 1-2" rainfalls. St Paul has an additional 9. And all flow on to the next municipality to deal with until we reach the Louisiana basin where it all flushes out into a dead zone the size of the state of Texas.

Minnesota should work toward a goal that the water that leaves the state as clean as it is at the headwaters.

How does air pollution affect our rivers?
Certain air pollutants such as heavy metals like mercury, when allowed to react with water, often create an even more intense and compounding problem that would be the equivalent of slowly poisoning ourselves by simply drinking water.

Daily pollutants from power plants, automobile traffic and other sources, most measured in tons, continue to fall into the river. Technological advances can reduce most of this pollution, but businesses resist investing in this technology, regulatory bodies have shown little courage in insisting that they do, and there are few incentives for people to drive more fuel efficient cars. We have more teeth in our zoning code than we do in our air and water protection statutes.

What joint efforts (other than testing) have begun statewide to improve the quality of our rivers for drinking and fishing?
There appear to be a lot of initiatives, mostly on paper, by a number of bodies ranging from the Met Council to local municipalities to clean up our waterways. However, implementation and funding seem to prevent any real improvements. Bipartisan leadership is needed to focus on what is good for our natural resources, which transcend political ideology. Minneapolis has written an updated Critical Area Plan (mandated by a 25 year old state statute), but virtually no one in the public has seen this plan, there has been no attempt to integrate it into other planning efforts and it is likely that none of it will be enforced.

What measures, if any, are being taken to alert the wide range of cultures living along our rivers not to swim in, drink, or eat fish from the waters of the Mississippi River?
MCNC, with the help of the Minneapolis Park Board will be posting signs this summer in an educational effort to alert all those who fish along the Upper River Corridor of the true condition of the water. The need is greater than the resources.

As far as we know, there has been no attempt by state agencies such as the DNR to adequately inform either urban or rural residents of the fish advisories. There is no longer a print version of the state fish advisory, making it unlikely that low and moderate-income residents would be aware of it. Mass media make little effort to publish fish advisory data or periodically run public announcements about the dangers of eating fish, especially for children and women of childbearing age.