Six New Lakes Got Invaders This Year, and Next Year Hubbard County Gets Half the Money to Fight Them

Fall in north-central Minnesota is when the docks come out, the pontoons get that last wash, and somebody finds a tiny striped mussel stuck to a bunk board and suddenly the whole lake association group chat wakes up.

Hubbard County just lived that version of autumn. Then it got the budget memo.

The year the list got longer

According to the Park Rapids Enterprise, Hubbard County Environmental Services’ Aaron Anderson told the Hubbard County Coalition of Lake Associations that aquatic invasive species showed up in six county lakes in 2026. Three of those listings landed in roughly the last 60 days:

Little Wolf Lake — zebra mussels, confirmed by the DNR on Sept. 14 after an angler reported them on vegetation
Eleventh Crow Wing Lake near Akeley — zebra mussels, confirmed Oct. 1 after a Hubbard County watercraft inspector found them on a boat coming off for the season
Eighth Crow Wing Lake — rusty crayfish, which the Enterprise reports the DNR confirmed on Oct. 12

Earlier in the year, Anderson said, zebra mussels turned up in Kabekona Lake, curly-leaf pondweed in First Crow Wing Lake, and starry stonewort in Spider Lake.

When my to-do list grows that fast, I make coffee and stare at the wall. These folks count inspection hours.

“Nobody wants to find these things,” Anderson told COLA, “but if we do find them, and find them early enough, they can be managed more efficiently. The smaller the patch, the more tools in your toolbox to treat that patch.”

Early detection is the whole game. Which is awkward timing for what comes next.

Half the state money

Minnesota’s Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Aid — the county-level money that pays for a lot of those ramp inspectors — has been $10 million a year. The Minnesota Department of Revenue says that for aids payable in 2027 and after, the appropriation drops to $5 million. Half.

WTIP reported over the summer that counties and AIS folks had already fought once to push the cut later; Cook County AIS supervisor Amanda Weberg said advocates “flooded our representatives’ offices” and bought time. The cut still lands in 2027.

For Hubbard, Anderson told COLA the county is planning around roughly 10,000 inspection hours next year — about a 30 percent cut from 2026. He’s hoping that turns into about 17,000 inspections, or roughly 20 percent fewer than they’ve been doing.

Thirty percent fewer hours on a denser infestation map. That’s coffee-mug-down math for a lake association president.

Split shifts and windshield notes

Anderson isn’t pretending they can keep every access covered the old way. The Enterprise reports he’s leaning into a “split shift” experiment: one inspector covers more than one access in a shift. Same number of days of coverage per access, he said, at roughly 60 percent of the cost.

Fewer hours at any one ramp means fewer boats get checked there. So they plan to “cherry pick” busy windows — Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, holidays — and leave reminder cards on windshields when nobody’s staffing the landing.

“Is it as good as an inspection? No,” Anderson said, “but at least it’s something that we have in our toolbox that we can leave behind.”

A card on a windshield in April wind. I’ve seen grocery lists that survived longer. Still: it’s something.

The part that lands

Here’s what gets me. A lot of these lakes weren’t coasting. The 10th/11th Crow Wing Lakes Association told neighbors on Oct. 4 that they’d been funding extra paid inspection hours at the ramp with the City of Akeley and Akeley Township since the early 2010s — more than $3,000 a year, plus COLA hours — and voluntary zebra-mussel veliger sampling for years. They did the responsible northwoods thing. Then fall dock-pulling season arrived, a county inspector found mussels on a boat coming out, and the DNR confirmed more at the access.

Prevention isn’t a trophy you hang on the wall. It’s a chore you keep doing because the alternative is teaching your grandkids to watch where they step on the beach.

Anderson also expects more budget pressure in the next biennium. Hubbard is trying to squeeze more inspections per thinner hour. Attainable, he said. Not glamorous.

What you can still do on a Thursday

If your boat, lift, or trailer still owes the lake a goodbye: clean it, drain it, dry it. Pull the plug. Check the bunks, the carpet, the livewell — the little corners where a zebra mussel can ride for free. The DNR keeps saying end-of-season pullouts are when a lot of new infestations get found.

And if your lake association asks for membership money, or for somebody to empty a line tube, or for a Saturday morning at the ramp with a clipboard: that’s not filler. That’s the county trying to stretch 10,000 hours across a map that just got six new problem lakes.

I can’t fix the state appropriation from my kitchen table. I can rinse the trailer like it matters. Because around Park Rapids right now, it does.

Sources

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