Four cities to test wells after audit raises pollution concerns

Four Minnesota cities will undertake independent investigations of their drinking water supplies after a lawsuit by a former state employee and an ensuing audit raised concerns about how the state cleans up pollution from thousands of petroleum spills.

The Legislature gave $200,000 to the central Minnesota city of Paynesville, which will hire a firm and work with the cities of Alexandria, Blaine and Foley to test the sites of four known petroleum leaks. The tests will determine the risk in drinking the water to better understand whether the cities should dig up and remove the contaminated soil or leave it to break down naturally, as the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has directed.

“It seems like the simplest way to do this is to excavate the site, clean it up and get it all out,” Paynesville Mayor Shawn Reinke said. “We excavated some of it, but we’ve had constant pushback over the years from the MPCA, saying ‘No, no, no, that’s not the right way to do it.’ “

MPCA officials said they have been testing the quality of drinking water around the sites of the leaks for years and are confident the water is clean and safe.

“We have early warning detection systems in place and we will know if the contamination is moving,” said Jamie Wallerstedt, director of the MPCA’s remediation division. “We are confident the plume is stable, and we are going to continue monitoring it.”

The MPCA’s petroleum remediation program was first called into question in November, when longtime MPCA employee Mark Toso sued the agency, saying managers retaliated against him for raising concerns that they were improperly closing cases.

Toso, a leaded gasoline expert who worked in the agency’s remediation division from 1992 until he resigned in 2021, said the agency routinely classified leaks that posed a high risk to public health and drinking water as low risk. The “low-risk” designation allowed the MPCA to shift from cleaning leak sites to moving drinking wells away from the contamination and waiting for it to naturally biodegrade, which could take more than a century, Toso argued in his lawsuit.

But while the drinking wells may be moved to draw clean water, that process ignores the risk that the contamination still poses to public, he said — especially if the site is redeveloped in the future, or a new private well is drilled, or if the contamination plume shifts and spreads. The MPCA has closed about 5,000 cases of gasoline leaks from storage tanks across the state.

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