It is true that some elected officials have had meetings to try and get MnDOT to protect coldwater with a properly designed road.
Unfortunately MnDOT buries their head in a delusion that their road has no effect on the Spring, which leaves those letters and meetings ineffective.
No matter how much evidence you show MnDOT you still see them in the newspaper the next day saying something stupid like "seasonal variations" is what causes the low water flow.
Yet amazingly they can't point to any time the Spring flowed so low without their pumping, even during drought.
And when the Spring increases in flow when the pumps turned off, MnDOT says it is due to rain, regardless of how much rain we had.
So in the end, it will take more than a letter, or a meeting.
We need to get MnDOT to open their eyes and see what they are really doing.
It's really not a big deal to say the design will impact the Spring, and we need to follow an alternative design.
But MnDOT is playing the money card....Poor us, we didn't do an environmental impact statement, we didn't do any testing until we were sued, we didn't listen when the public who said there was a problem years earlier, we didn't look at alternative designs when we were at the planning stage.
Poor MnDOT is now complaining that it will cost too much money.
Well that happens when you totally fail to do any real preparation to see what a design does. Even now they point to the most expensive plan, a concrete liner rather than raising the road a few feet to get it out of the water table.
Yeah, good idea, a multimillion dollar concrete liner instead of a raised roadbed.
The Spring was designated as a historical site in the 1950's so it's not as if MnDOT didn't know it was there. This is the result of poor planning at the beginning of the project.
I for one, don't believe that poor planning means MnDOT gets to do whatever they want. I hope our elected officials can see that poor planning is the problem, not laws that say protect our resources like Coldwater Spring.
Tom Holtzleiter
Kingfield
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