Top Minnesota officials are sending encouraging signals about a revised plan for the controversial Fargo-Moorhead flood diversion project as the public comment period begins on the draft environmental impact statement. A federal judge halted the original plan last year after Minnesota officials warned of downstream flooding on the Red River. DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr says, “The proposed Plan B goes a long ways towards addressing the bigger of those issues in particular.”
Officials estimate “Plan B” will increase the cost of the two-plus-billion-dollar project by about 200 million dollars. Landwehr says, “To my knowledge there’s not been any sort of state level legislative discussions about cost share, and so I think at least from the standpoint of Minnesota, there’s an assumption that there will be some contribution but there’s not been any commitments to this point.”