There’s another battle brewing at the Minnesota Legislature over new ag buffer laws designed to limit runoff from farm fields into rivers and lakes. Governor Mark Dayton said last week about Republicans’ attempt to make changes, “Not negotiable, not for discussion. I will veto any bill that has any gutting or delay in the buffer [implementation]. I went through that last year with them.” Dayton adds, “I took the private ditches out two years ago…. They came back last year for more. We agreed, finally. They were on record, members of the legislature as well as interest groups that they were satisfied with the bill, and now they want to go back and delay it again.”
Roseau Representative Dan Fabian responds, “I have six- or eight-hundred miles of public ditches just in Roseau County. So the timelines in terms of implementation, I don’t believe that they’re reasonable.” He adds, “We don’t have the resources and the manpower and, quite frankly, the willingness of the local landowners to take this on.”
Fabian says all four counties he represents have passed resolutions opposing the buffer law as it’s currently constructed. “This is a program that needs to be implemented at the local level,” he says. “If the state D-N-R and BWSR [Board of Water and Soil Resources] is gonna come out with a club, rather than the local people coming with a carrot, this isn’t gonna work in my district.”
Dayton says opponents of the buffer law are acting “as though there’s no urgency to our water contamination problem in this state…. Let’s just put it off for another year. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t gonna affect anybody’s life. It’s just inexcusable.”
Hear Dayton’s comments here:
And Fabian’s response: