Seven years on, wetland damage on a Hennepin County farm hasn’t been fixed

A farmer in western Hennepin County drained 11 acres in what a county official described as the worst wetland violation he had seen in his career. Seven years later, nothing has been done to mend or mitigate the damage.

This is despite years of attempts to close the case — including a 2021 settlement that the farmer signed, which absolved him of the majority of the destruction.

The farmer, Ernie Mayers, blames the county for failing to maintain a ditch that allowed water to collect on his land on Larkin Road in Corcoran. His attorney, Tom DeVincke, said Mayers didn’t believe there were originally wetlands on his farm, but was attempting to enroll himself in a state program for wetland restoration anyway.

DeVincke has urged the city of Corcoran, which is now responsible for the case, to hold off of any action as Mayers explores a restoration program.

Corcoran, meanwhile, tried as recently as August to get final confirmation that Mayers had complied with the settlement, but it was unsuccessful, the city’s public works director, Kevin Mattson, wrote in an email. The city now said it plans to turn the case over to state officials for enforcement.

James Kujawa, who originally discovered the damage on Mayers’ farm when he worked for Hennepin County, said the case was “the biggest violation during my career of the Wetland Conservation Act,” a law which is designed to ensure there is no net loss of wetlands in Minnesota.

Kujawa said it’s important to protect wetlands, which provide wildlife habitat, flood protection and improved water quality. But he also said Mayers has been successful in repeatedly stalling his case and was “getting by with something that the normal person can’t get by with.”

Kujawa worked as a senior environmentalist for the county, assisting the Elm Creek Watershed Management Commission, which protects water quality in the region. He received a tip in 2017 that Mayers was digging through wetlands, and officials from the state and watershed commission convened to examine the land.

They found unpermitted work in several areas, including an underground tile line that had drained 11 acres, as well as a road and two new ditches that had together damaged about half an acre. The work also damaged additional wetlands outside the farm that are regulated under a separate program. Kujawa said the group never determined exactly how far the additional damage extended.

Mayers was served with a restoration order that required him to remove the underground tile drain, plug the ditches and remove fill he had placed for the road. While the case was initiated by the Watershed Commission, the group handed off its wetland duties to surrounding towns and cities during this period. In 2019, the city of Corcoran took over the case.

Mayers appealed, and Corcoran reached a settlement with him. The 2021 agreement allowed Mayers to leave the 11 acres drained by tile line untouched but still required that he fill in a ditch and buy wetland mitigation bank credits in a 4-to-1 ratio to compensate for work on a fraction of an acre.

“Yeah, he’s getting some concessions, but the point was to get it resolved,” said Travis Germundson, of the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, which supervised the settlement process. “That didn’t happen, I guess.”

In a brief phone call, Mayers said that wetland regulators were “thieves” who were “stealing farmland from the farmers and making it wetland.” He expressed frustration he was not allowed to clean out county ditches, which Hennepin County has not consistently maintained since the 1960s.

He then said he needed to talk to his lawyer before discussing the case further. Neither Mayers or his attorney, DeVincke, explained why he has diverged from a settlement agreement that he signed and had a hand in negotiating.

“Ernie is actually taking a different route,” DeVincke said, and is hoping to get credit for the wetlands on his farm through a state program.

Mayers won’t be allowed to enroll in a wetland restoration program, Germundson said. BWSR administers the Wetland Conservation Act and runs several restoration programs. Germundson said nobody with a pending violation is allowed to take part in them.

Mattson, the public works director for Corcoran, wrote that the city now plans to refer the case back to the Department of Natural Resources to enforce the original restoration order. DNR could serve Mayers with a civil citation, or even put a deed restriction on the land in question, an agency spokesperson said.

Germundson said he had not seen another case in 15 years with BWSR where someone signed a settlement and later changed their mind.

“Obviously the goal is to to get voluntary compliance,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like at this point that’s gonna occur.”