As McLeod County and Glencoe continue to move closer to launching a project to extend Morningside Avenue in Glencoe, there is one more bump in the road.
The plan is to extend Morningside Avenue to 16th Street on the northeast side of Glencoe in order to give traffic passing through the city a faster route to and from U.S. Highway 212, and allow motorists to avoid downtown. Supporters of the project have pointed to it as an important step for growth in Glencoe.
To complete the project, a 0.084 section of wetlands will need to be filled in and replaced at a 2-to-1 ratio because the wetlands were part of mitigation for a past project. It comes at a cost of $13,584 and a fee of $389 to the state Board of Soil and Water Resources. The county and city will share the cost.
“In the scope of a road project this is just a few dollars,” said Board Member Ron Shimanski. “But it irritates me. The cost of the wetland replacement acres, it’s extremely high.”
The cost was driven up because there is a shortage of wetlands projects officially enrolled in state programs. Board Member Doug Krueger said the credit program felt like “smoke and mirrors” because there are other wetlands nearby in McLeod County.
The wetlands replaced by the project will be in McLeod County, South and Water Conservation District director Ryan Freitag told the County Board. Krueger asked Freitag if other landowners were jumping through the hoops necessary to enroll more acres from the county. Freitag said there had been interest, but no new paperwork submitted.
