Yellow Medicine River Watershed District (YMRW)

Welcome to the Yellow Medicine River Watershed District Website

The Yellow Medicine River and the associated watershed is a major tributary of the Minnesota River. The watershed district is funded by tax paying citizens of Yellow Medicine, Lincoln and Lyon Counties of Southwest Minnesota. Look over our website for information regarding our watershed. Email us with any comments or questions you may have. We love hearing from you!

The South Branch TMDL Implementation Final Report June 2011

Review the YMRWD Overall Plan.

The Yellow Medicine River Watershed District recently completed the process of updating our 10 year watershed management plan. The Board of Soil and Water Resources reviewed and approved our 10 year overall plan in the Spring of 2009.

This watershed district has made great strides in the last ten years, and expects the next 10 years to be even more productive and progressive.

Lake Shaokatan TMDL Project

A 30-day public comment period held July 6, 2009 - August 5, 2009 yielded 65 comment letters. Most of the comments were positive and supportive of the project. A few comment letters contained suggestions for improving the draft report. Since then, MPCA and YMRWD worked together to revise the report.

The following changes were made to the TMDL report:

· Corrected typographical errors throughout report.

· Updated land use and land cover information with more recent data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service and the National Land cover Dataset.

· Included a 0.042 kg total phosphorus/day for waste load allocations to account for construction storm water.

· Removed subjectivity and negative inferences toward agriculture throughout the report.

· Updated feedlot information using MPCA’s and Lincoln County feedlot databases.

· Removed water quality data not related to the phosphorus water quality standard.

· Revised Pollutant Assessment section to include internal loading, atmospheric deposition and updated land use/land cover information.

· Used a range of phosphorus loading rates in the Pollutant Assessment section to estimate watershed loading sources.

· Inserted additional information regarding internal loading impacts.

· Condensed the report by combining the Linkage Analysis and TMDL sections.

· Clarified Lake Shaokatan’s critical conditions.

· Provided more information regarding 2005 conditions and lake’s response.

· Removed figures and charts that were confusing and unrelated to the TMDL.

· Included discussion regarding conservation activities in the watershed.

A second public comment period will be held in early 2010. For more information about the project, please see http://www.pca.state.mn.us/water/tmdl/project-lakeshaokatan.html