08-23-2023 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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still showed I-35E slated to pass directly through Blackhawk Lake. But strong public resistance to this idea in the 1980s caused planners to have to change its route and bypass that lake. To this day, Blackhawk Lake remains viable and offers fishing for residents. Aerial view of I-35E where it by-passes Blackhawk Lake in Eagan, MN On the other hand, Savage Lake has markedly declined since the highway was constructed through it. Little Canada resident, Virginia Smith, has lived along the lake for 75 years. She remembers its condition before the highway was built and recalls that the lake once was known for its clarity. Her grandfather, for example, backed a wagon up to the lake and drew water out to take home for doing the family’s washing. It’s hard to imagine someone doing such a thing now with the lake in its current condition. Although there are no records describing the lake when Virginia’s grandfather was drawing water from the lake, it probably was ten feet deep in places then. She recalls that the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) used to stock the lake with fish in those earlier times. Now, according to another resident, “abuse…has turned the lake into a lily infested deadzone.” And the most significant abuse of Savage Lake over time has been the construction of I-35E through the lake. Today the two parts of the lake are connected by only a thirty-inch pipe under the highway (no bridge was built) causing a number of continuing negative effects on the depth and quality. The intact Savage Lake, before the highway came along, held much more water than it does now. Apart from considerations of it having been deeper then, I’ve estimated that the 200 to 400 feet-wide Interstate roadbed through the lake displaced as much as 20 percent of the lake’s original volume! Recent Watershed District charts show that the current lake is also much shallower than it formerly was with a maximum depth now of less than six feet. This depth is prescribed and regulated by the DNR, and the shallow water is an important factor contributing to the lake having become overgrown with aquatic plants in recent years. More recently, and likely in response to the lake’s shallow depth, the Department of Natural Resources and the Watershed District have begun to regard Savage Lake as merely a 27-acre wetland rather than a true lake. This does not bode well for the lake’s future restoration to a condition more like it was at the time of the early settlement of Little Canada. Even the Minnesota Department of