“Golden Lake is a lake that the watershed district has spent a lot of effort on,” said Kyle Axtell, a water resource specialist with the Rice Creek Watershed District. “It’s a lake that is on the state’s impaired waters list for excess phosphorus.” “The water has a lot of tint to it, a lot of stain to it,” said Circle Pines Mayor Dave Bartholomay. .
“The goal for this project is to reduce that load of phosphorus, so in the long run, this project, along with other efforts we’ve undertaken, hopefully we’ll see the water clear up a little bit and the algae blooms won’t be quite as bad,” said Axtell.
An iron-enhanced sand filter will be built to filter the excess phosphorus out of the water before it flows into Golden Lake. It should filter out about 84 percent of all the phosphorus that currently flows in.
“The filter, when it’s done, is going to look a little bit like sand zen garden up on land, or a beach,” said Anoka Conservation District Manager, Chris Lord. “It’s not going to be exciting to look at.”
Golden Lake, like many other metro area lakes, suffers from urban runoff, but there are steps that homeowners can take to reduce their negative impact on storm water. One major one is to keep your grass clippings out of the street. If the clipping end up in the curb and gutter, rain water takes all the phosphorus from those clippings and puts in right into the storm drains, and then into the lakes.
The filter will be constructed in the summer of 2018 and once it is up and running the improvement will be very gradual.
“This lake took 75 years or 100 years to go through this process, and so we’re not going to turn this around right away, but this is a really big, big step,” said Mayor Bartholomay. “It’s not like we are going to flip a switch and this lake becomes clear,” he added.
Golden Lake is a popular destination on a hot summer day and with this project in place the city and their partners are confident that the future of Golden Lake has never been clearer.
“This isn’t making a little bit of a difference to this lake, it’s actually planned to make a big difference,” said Lord.
