Upstream landowners ponder discrepancies between North Dakota, Minnesota F-M Diversion payouts

CHRISTINE, N.D. — Josh Granholt has spent much of his life on quiet farmland tucked into the bends of the Red River.

His family has farmed land near Christine for more than 100 years. Those fields give way to forested groves along the river, where he and his parents live today.

Despite their proximity to the river, the main houses on the Granholt family’s farmsteads have never flooded, even in years where cities to the north were inundated with water.

“The old timers put a house where it made sense and didn’t flood, not where it looked cool, because they didn’t want to deal with it,” Granholt said.

The construction of the

Fargo-Moorhead Area Diversion

upstream will change how Granholt’s land floods. He hopes to get compensated fairly for newly flooded land — and equally to landowners on the Minnesota side of the river.

The diversion is a $3.2 billion flood control project designed to protect the Fargo-Moorhead metro from extreme floods. When operational, the project will hold water south of the metro behind a 22-mile earthen embankment. Three gated structures will control the release of floodwater into the Red River, the Wild Rice River and a 30-mile diversion channel that arcs west around the cities.

In order to hold water south of the embankment, the Metro Flood Diversion Authority, a governmental entity that oversees parts of the project, needs to secure property rights to store water on the land south of the dam. It has been doing so in the form of flowage easements. Property owners are paid for giving the Diversion Authority the right to flood their land.

The Granholt family properties are among those the Diversion Authority is in the process of securing property rights for through the eminent domain process, which allows a government to take land for public use.

Proposed flowage easements on Granholt family land pay for flooding in places that have never flooded before. But on the Minnesota side of the Red River, flowage easements cover far more land and stretch farther south along the river.

In Minnesota, maps for the project show the Diversion Authority is acquiring flowage easements well into Wilkin County, about 30 miles south of Moorhead.

In North Dakota, a majority of flowage easements are in Cass County. Flowage easements in Richland County are along the Red River or waterways that flow into the Red River. The southernmost flowage easements in North Dakota are southeast of Christine, across the river from Wolverton, Minn. Wolverton is about 22 miles south of Moorhead.

Differences in flowage easements between North Dakota and Minnesota come down to the fact that the project involves two different states with different permitting requirements, Diversion Authority Executive Director Jason Benson said.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources permit requires property mitigation for up to a tenth of a foot of impact of the principal maximum flood, Benson said, which is “kind of the biblical flood, something that’s hard to comprehend.”

On the North Dakota side, the state requires mitigation for up to a half foot to the 100-year or 500-year flood levels, whichever is a higher impact, he said. A 100-year flood has a 1% chance of happening in any given year, while a 500-year flood has a 0.2% chance of happening in any given year.

“We’re applying Minnesota permit and regulations and rules for Minnesota residents and land mitigation on the Minnesota side. We’re applying North Dakota rules, regulations and law for land that we’re mitigating on the North Dakota side,” Benson said.

Permitting differences are the

basis of landowner countersuits in the eminent domain process.

Landowners represented by attorney Cash Aaland began filing counterclaims in eminent domain proceedings in February, alleging that North Dakota landowners are not being paid for all the water that could be displaced onto their property, or for the resulting damages, when the diversion’s southern dam holds back a maximum amount of water.

While the permit requirements are different in the two states, Granholt thinks Minnesota and North Dakota landowners should receive the same treatment.

“If Minnesota gets paid for everything, for an inch and above, not only do I think we should be compensated, but we should know where that is,” Granholt said.

Further, Granholt worries that if 6 inches of water did fill the flowage easement area, more shallow areas of water would stretch farther onto his property.

“Does that mean there’s going to be 5 inches someplace we’re not getting compensated for?” Granholt said. “Because whether it’s 1 inch or 1 foot in your basement, it’s still water in there, isn’t it?”

Ken Knudsen lives a couple miles north of Granholt, northeast of Christine. His land is similar to Granholt’s — a grove of trees in one of the Red River’s loops, with a house built high enough to avoid flooding.

With the proposed flowage easements on his land, Knudsen expected to negotiate an amount for the water that could be stored on his land and a payout for the tear-down of a garage turned “man cave.” Finding out that Aaland thinks that water could go higher was not good news.

“I don’t want to move, and I don’t want to sell and I don’t want to fight floods that I’ve been told shouldn’t happen to our place,” Knudsen said.

The land Knudsen lives on was one of the original farmsteads in the area, he said, meaning that the brothers who moved there got to pick the best plot of land.

“I’d like to see that our farm doesn’t flood and we can just stay there, and it’s a beautiful place to live and pass it onto our kids and whatever,” Knudsen said. “If we’re going to end up having to fight floods every time they use the dam, then we’d have to think differently.”

The Diversion Authority does have a mechanism for landowners to bring forward claims if diversion operations flood more land than flowage easements cover. In such cases, landowners will be able to bring claims to a dispute resolution board created by the Diversion Authority. That board will determine if damage was caused by the project.

Granholt said he’s aware of that process.

“It’s usually easier to get it the first time than to come back and ask for more,” Granholt said.