The storm over the stormwater garden

Bayfront Park sits on a flat piece of land between downtown Duluth and the harbor.

Organizers say it's a perfect place for a storm water garden. With every rain, salt, and oil wash off the city streets and nitrogen seeps from fertilized lawns. At the moment, it all flows directly into Lake Superior.

A storm water garden would capture some of that runoff and treat it in a series of constructed wetlands filled with native plants.

Jill Jacoby is the driving force behind the idea. She says the popular Bayfront Park is an ideal place to educate people about how wetlands purify water.

"We are creating a recreational, eco-tourist area that I think is going to set the city apart," she says. "I really think that once this is built, it's going to be dynamic. People will come here to visit it."

At a reception at the Depot, she showed her plans to a small but enthusiastic crowd.

She says she first got interested in water quality years ago.

"It's been long process," she says. "From an educator flipping over a rock, and showing me a bug, and telling me that that bug meant the water was clean. I was city kid. I never knew bugs related to the health of water."

Jacoby earned a masters degree in water resources. And for 10 years she's been working on plans for a storm water garden for Duluth's Bayfront Park.

She recruited Patricia Johanson to design the garden. Johanson has built water gardens in big cities around the United States and in several foreign countries. In Duluth, city support for the project has been lukewarm. The city council approved planning for a half-acre garden, but Jacoby wants more land.

So now there are three different designs.

If the garden is just a half-acre, the design from above looks like a flower -- specifically the Swamp Rose.

The designs for a two-acre garden and a three-acre garden would take the shape of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Duluth itself sits at the headwaters of that entire water system.

Each of the Great Lakes would be planted with a different native wetland plant.

"Lake Superior, for example, is all planted in a smartweed, which gets a very pretty pink flower," she says. "And it's all going to bloom at the same time, so when you're standing on the hillside for example, and you look down, you're going to see a fuzzy image of Lake Superior in pink. People are going to learn their wetland plants and they're going to see the beauty of them."

But not everybody is convinced.

City councilor Jim Stauber says he likes the idea, but he has several problems with the plan. For one thing, he says the city can't afford to pay for any of it, not even for maintenance after the garden is built.

More importantly, he says the land belongs to the Duluth Economic Development Authority, and it has to be used for economic development

"For quite some time, we have been very clear, and our city attorney's staff has been very clear: you can't put it here," he says.

He says Duluth has lots of other places that would work just fine for a storm water garden.

Especially since the concrete retaining wall on the edge of the Bayfront Park property is crumbling into the water. Stauber says the city doesn't have money to fix that either.

"I mean it's all caving in," he says. "And right now typically we have that orange fencing to keep people away."

Stauber says the city shouldn't spend money to fix it until there's a definite plan for the entire piece of land.

But Jacoby says if she can't build it where people will see it, she won't build it at all.

Some city councilors wish the garden plans wouldn't keep growing.

But Jacoby says the bigger garden could handle larger groups, like school classes and scout troops. And the more elaborate garden would become a destination for visitors, rather than just something to look at once they're already here.

She estimates the gardens would cost about a million dollars per acre to build, and she's ready to start raising money from grants and individual donors.

Kurt Leuthold is the engineer who translated the artist's vision into a water treatment system. He says it's been an unusual project.

"Working with an artist, an artist's vision of what it looks like, and then actually trying to figure out how to build a 30-foot wide turtle, and simulations of Niagara Falls and things like that -- it's a bit of a challenge," he says.

But he believes in the project too.

"Hopefully what this is going to do is educate people to the importance of wetlands," he says. "Get them walking through a wetland, or a simulation of a wetland. With awareness comes protection, and that's the ultimate goal, to protect our wetlands."

The City Council will be discussing the issue over the next several weeks.

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