Corn port inks deal with LCC

MONTROSE – The Iowa Ports Association and the Lee County Conservation District formalized plans today to begin work bringing some islands back to Pool 19 on the Mississippi River in Lee County.
The two groups signed a memorandum of understanding at a ceremony at the Lee County Conservation District’s Heron Bend offices Wednesday afternoon.
Lee County Conservation District Director Heather Huebner told a group of about 25 people at the signing the work is now just beginning.
The Port Authority has pledged to raise $2.5 million of the $8 million project to bring dredged materials to the county along with some rock to build jetties in the river and resurrect two smaller islands using the dredge material.
“This represents not just a signature, but a significant step for Lee County,” Huebner said.
She said the project is literally in the district’s back yard and focuses on restoring critical habitat in Pool 19. She said that reduced wetland diversity is a result of the construction of the Keokuk dam and this will help reverse some of the impacts of the last 110 years.
“What we're doing now is turning those challenges into this reality to enhance island habitat, improve aquatic ecosystems, and increase recreational access,” Huebner said.
The effort is the culmination of a quarter century of advocacy to rehabilitate Pool 19, much under the leadership of Lee County resident Jim Noll.
Noll said if the advocacy campaign was compared to a business, “I would have been out of business a long time ago.”
He said the first attempt was to become part of a federal nature conservancy reserve, but after close to four years of working that angle for getting the pool restarted, he learned that it would be impossible.
“We started working on this originally to become part of the reserve, but politically that couldn’t be done so we wasted three of four years on that,” he said.

“The next thing was to do something outright and look for donations, but you’re talking about millions of dollars, so I focused on trying to do it this way and found a program to get into.”
The last few years Noll and conservation officials began looking into the NESP, Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, where federal dollars can be granted toward projects aimed at upgrading navigation infrastructure, while restoring the ecosystem on the Upper Mississippi River.
Noll said that direction looked favorable until federal funding was pulled back during President Donald Trump’s second administration. Noll said he thought the project was high up on the NESP sdadadpriority list, but the Army Corps of Engineers got nervous about spending money with the uncertainty around appropriations.
“So that’s kinda where we’re at today,” he said. “But this one will be done way before the next one.”
The next one would be a larger scale island restoration in the area of $30 million.
“That would be from 800 to 1,000 acres on the Mississippi,” he said. “There’s a lot of places underwater there.”
Dr. Anshu Singh, with Iowa Ports Association, said the port authority is serving as the non-federal sponsor for the federal money coming into the project. But the federal money won’t be released until the $2.5 million non-federal match is raised.
“We really need all your support to help get this project under construction,” she said.
Singh said Pool 19 is the only pool on the upper Mississippi River where there hasn’t been a single restoration project under any federal program.
Noll said in his trips to Des Moines and Washington D.C. to talk with legislators about the program he told them that no federal money had been spent on the pool and he said they didn’t believe him.
“They would say well you had money for this or that, but when I showed them the documentation they couldn’t believe it,” he said.
Huebner said she hopes to have work underway in the pool in the next 12 months.