10 key data points and graphs about loss of shoreline on Minnesota’s lakes

Inspired by MPR News’ series, “Trouble by the water: Minnesota’s vanishing natural lakeshores?” This supplement goes deeper into the trends and data, including some county- and even lake-level data about Minnesota’s most beloved resource: our beautiful lakes.

1) Shoreland building permits issued went down in recession, but have increased again in recent years

Permits are generally required in Minnesota for building any structure on a lot, or for adding on to an existing structure. In areas close to lakes, rivers and streams, known as shoreland, there are additional guidelines that must be followed.

While the state has minimum requirements that vary by water body, local zoning offices at the county or city level often have additional rules and specifications, and they can even have a broader definition of shoreland than the state minimums, requiring the stricter rules to be followed in more places.

Permits granted per year were at their highest in the mid-2000s and then dropped sharply. The assumption has been that this was due to the recession, said Dan Petrik, the lake and river shoreland program manager at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

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Even in slower years Minnesota’s shorelands have seen fairly steady development, with at least 6,000 permits issued throughout the state (not including Hennepin and Ramsey counties) every year between 2006 and 2022, except 2014.

Permits have been slowly going up since 2014, with a recent uptick in the first couple of years of the pandemic. In addition to factors such as increased telework, some lake-dense parts of the state have seen population increases. Crow Wing County, for example, added around 6,400 people between 2012 and 2022, which equates to an increase of around 10 percent.

A special note about the state’s permit and variance data: Minnesota DNR gathers data from county zoning authorities, but not from the zoning authorities of reservations or cities. Thus, this data covers only unincorporated areas of counties.

In addition, some townships in unincorporated areas are excluded since some have their own zoning authorities. So, while the graphics and tools we present give a sense of patterns and trends in shoreland permitting, if you are interested in a particular area, you will need to check with your local zoning authority for details.

This is especially true for the Twin Cities and surrounding areas, where a higher percentage of land in those counties is in incorporated areas. This page provides information about zoning offices and contact information by county.

2) Most shoreland permits are for redevelopment, not for building on undeveloped lots

According to a Minnesota DNR report, “most of the suitable shoreland lots in the state have already been developed.” But even if a lot is technically “developed,” people who want to replace their small cabin with something larger must apply for a building permit. Those kinds of redevelopment permits make up the majority of permits issued each year.

Regardless of whether the permit is for redevelopment or for development on new lots, if it is in a shoreland area, the building plan will need to meet certain additional standards. One of the main requirements is that structures must be built at a certain distance away from the shoreline.

The state minimums for this setback requirement vary from 50 feet to 200 feet. The exact distance depends on the type of water body, the level of existing development, whether the lot will be connected to the sewer system, and any local ordinances.

Another shoreland requirement is that a maximum of 25 percent of the lot can be covered by impervious surfaces, such as rooftops, decks, sidewalks, patios, swimming pools and driveways.

This is to encourage water to enter the ground, where it can be naturally filtered, instead of running directly into the lake, taking with it the chemicals and fertilizers that are typical on a developed lot.

In addition to building permits that are primarily focused on structures being added to the lot, there are also requirements for land-use permits for any activity that involves moving a certain amount of soil, such as grading, filling or excavating land.

Even if no building is occurring, these processes of moving soil can also affect erosion, runoff and other dynamics that impact lake quality. In some cases, a construction plan may require a building permit and an additional permit for moving soil.

While these permit numbers indicate a general sense of how much development activity is happening on Minnesota’s lakes, the data doesn’t tell the whole story. Just because a building is going up or soil is being moved around, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s detrimental to the lake or shoreline. In fact, sometimes a permit might be required to conduct restoration efforts.

3) Minnesota’s lake country has issued the most shoreland building permits in recent years

About a two-to-three-hour drive north of the Twin Cities lies a swath of the state with a particularly dense collection of lakes, referred to by some as “lake country.” We found that the counties in this area, recently, have issued the most shoreland building permits in Minnesota.

This isn’t a surprising result, given that this is where there are more lakes. But it does point to which county offices have the highest volume of permit applications to review and grant. Cass County is the busiest, averaging more than a thousand permits per year over the 2018-22 period.

Comparison between counties should be taken with a grain of salt, however. Counties may differ in their outreach and enforcement efforts. Some people may not realize they need a permit for grading and filling (i.e. moving earth around), and Petrik noted that this type of permit may be particularly hard to enforce especially in counties with less staff and fewer programs dedicated to shoreland management.

“I think a lot of that kind of work happens without a permit in those counties,” he said. “Unless somebody complains, you’re not necessarily going to know it’s happening.”

4) Even when considering the amount of shoreline by county, permitting in lake country stands out

To account for how much shoreland each county has available for building and development, APM Research Lab calculated an estimate of river and lake shoreline by county. It’s not a perfect analysis, as it doesn’t account for how far inland from the shoreline permits are required.

That distance varies by locality, water body type and other factors. But this analysis still gives some idea of how much development is happening given the relative amount of shoreland available.

Looking at this density of building permits by accounting for miles of shoreline ends up telling a similar story as the absolute number of permits. Some counties in northern Minnesota have thousands of miles of lake shoreline, but they have also granted thousands of permits.

5) Government sanctioned exceptions to zoning ordinances — called variances — issued on the state’s shorelands remain common even after the development boom in the mid-2000’s

What if it’s challenging to meet the shoreland rules in your building plan? Exceptions can sometimes be granted through a variance. There is an extra application process for variances, and there’s no guarantee of getting one. As with permits, these are applied for and granted by the local zoning authority.

The regulatory apparatus for granting variances differs by county and zoning authority. If variances are easily granted by the local zoning authority, or if enforcement of permit and variances rules are lax, it's more likely that shorelines will become overdeveloped and have lower quality natural habitat.

The state’s data suggests that a shoreland variance is issued for about one in every 10 shoreland building permits.

6) Look up how many variances and permits have been issued in your county

We compiled how many variances and permits have been issued in Minnesota’s shoreland for most of the counties in the state. (See our note above about the lack of data in some counties.) The number and trend over time for permits and variances granted differs significantly from county to county.

While it may be useful to get a sense of how many permits or variances your county has granted in recent years, we suggest caution in directly comparing counties to each other. For example, counties have wide-ranging amounts of shoreline. And some counties have stricter guidelines than others, so the same building plan might be approved without a variance in one county but require a variance in another county. Petrik said that the lake-rich area of north-central Minnesota, for instance, tends to have stricter guidelines than counties in some other areas of the state.

The variance and permit numbers also do not offer insight on enforcement of rules. Petrik said, “some counties are better equipped and have more robust administrative programs for outreach and enforcement, resulting in more compliance by property owners seeking permits (including variances).”

So, a county could grant more variances than another county because it’s more lax in granting exceptions, but it could also be because it’s better at making residents follow the rules.

Petrik also noted that “many counties work specifically to prevent variance applications, working with potential applicants to modify project design in such a way that a variance isn’t needed, or the amount of deviation is minimized.”

7) Explore habitat quality in Minnesota’s lake country

Within Minnesota’s lake country — Aitkin, Becker, Cass, Crow Wing, Douglas, Hubbard, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Otter Tail, Todd and Wadena counties — nearly one in five lakes scored by the Minnesota DNR are rated a low-quality habitat.

Roughly the same proportion are rated a high-quality habitat. The majority are rated as moderate-quality habitat — meaning two of the three lakeshore zones (shoreland, shoreline and aquatic) have high proportions of natural habitat, while the other zone is more developed.

The lakes in this map account for 429 of more than 4,000 lakes of 10 acres or more in the 11 counties listed above. This number of scored lakes is slightly more than half the total number of unique lakes scored statewide thus far by the Minnesota DNR.

8) Look up the shoreline habitat quality of the lakes you care about

If you don’t see your lake in the lookup table, consider performing your own lakeshore assessment with the Score Your Shore resources for citizen action.

9) Recent data indicates some lakes are improving

Shoreland rules are in place, in part, to ensure that Minnesota’s lakes are healthy enough for humans to recreate in, use as drinking water sources and use for fishing. Residential and commercial development near lakes is more likely to lead to excessive amounts of nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, entering lakes.

Sources of these nutrients include residential yard maintenance, agriculture fields and discharges of treated wastewater. Erosion also leads to higher levels of phosphorus. The more vegetation and natural buffers that are kept or restored along the shorelines, the more this helps prevent these nutrients from going directly into the water.

If lakes have nutrient levels that are too high, excessive amounts of algae and aquatic plants can grow, which can impede swimming and boating on the lake. As these organisms take over, they deplete the amount of oxygen available to other life in the lake.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency assesses the water quality of lakes based on what that lake should be able to used for — for example, drinking water, aquatic recreation and fish consumption.

Every two years, MPCA updates the list of lakes that are considered “impaired” — meaning that some sort of pollutant or stressor is considered too high given how the lake is supposed to be used.

Lakes with a designated use of aquatic recreation cover around 2.2 million acres in Minnesota — a good portion of the lakes in the state. About 28 percent (622,000 acres) of those waters are considered impaired due to high levels of nutrients. For another 15 percent of those waters, there is insufficient information to determine the nutrient levels.

When the state’s analysis shows that a lake is impaired, it is added to a list called the impaired waters list. This list gives the state a starting point, so that they can then prioritize restoration efforts. If upon later analysis the lake is shown to have improved enough, it is removed from the list.

In the most recent report, more lakes were removed from the list of nutrient-impaired waters than were added, a first since at least 2002, when the data on currently impaired waters begins. But, the state doesn’t evaluate every lake every year. In fact, most lakes are analyzed for nutrients once every 10 years. And the state only recently finished its first 10-year cycle, so most lakes were recently added to the impaired list and have not yet been formally assessed more than once.

So, while recent reports suggest a promising trend, it’s also possible that the recently assessed watersheds have improved, while other watersheds are not seeing the same trend.

Nonetheless, MPCA says the increasing number of lakes being removed from the list is likely a statewide trend, according to Leya Charles, the water assessment and impaired waters list coordinator for the agency.

10) Look up if the lakes you care about have too many nutrients

This lookup tool focuses on which lakes have too many nutrients — the stressor most closely linked to the development discussed in this lakeshore series. You can find more information about the quality of Minnesota water bodies in this tool provided by the U.S. EPA.

If you don’t see the lake you are searching for on this list, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is free of pollutants. There are several possibilities for why a lake might not appear on the list: It could have been assessed and found not to be impaired, it could have an impairment other than nutrients or it could not have been assessed.

One lake you won’t find in the table? Kohlman Lake, in Ramsey County, was removed from the nutrient-impaired waters list this year, following a near-30-year effort to improve its water quality.

The pollution control agency highlighted it in a news release, and the story of its cleanup demonstrates how restoring shoreland is not the only method for decreasing the amount of nutrients entering Minnesota’s water bodies.

Reducing nutrient output at its source is another possible strategy — for example, in some areas reducing the amount of fertilizer used in agriculture might be key.

And in more developed areas like Ramsey County, improving stormwater management practices in the broader area of the watershed, not just right near the shoreline, can also make a big difference. For Kohlman Lake, this meant installing rain gardens in parking lots at Maplewood Mall and several churches, as well as adjusting street sweeping techniques.

Funding for this series is provided in part by the Four Cedars Environmental Fund of the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.