Retaining Walls Not Always Best Option for Shoreline Property

When Mary and Richard Gallea bought a 30-year-old home on Great Northern Lake a few years ago, it came with an unwanted feature.

A 5-foot-high retaining wall made of old railroad ties near the shore clearly wasn’t going to last much longer.

“Literally, chunks of it would fall out as I hit it with the mower,” Richard Gallea said.

The Galleas asked Stearns County’s shore land review panel for a permit to replace the wall. Instead, members of the panel asked him to consider getting rid of it and returning the shore to a more natural state.

“To be honest with you, my first reaction was, ‘To hell with that,’ ” Richard Gallea laughed.

But after giving it some thought, the Galleas decided to accept financial assistance from the county Soil and Water Conservation District and embark on a major restoration project.

Two years, $40,000 and hundreds of trees and native plants later, they are evangelists who preach the virtues of natural shorelines as beautiful and environmentally beneficial.

“It’s clearly the right thing to do,” Richard Gallea said.

Not everyone shares that sentiment. Retaining walls remain popular with lakeshore owners, as evidenced by the number of them requesting permits from the county — about 25 each year in Stearns.

And not all homeowners bother to ask permission first. At a meeting earlier this month, the shore land review panel’s agenda included five cases of retaining walls that homeowners built without getting the necessary permit first.

Aging retaining walls are likely to be a growing problem, given the number of them that were built decades ago of materials ranging from creosote-soaked railroad ties to scraps of granite.

Already, the county is starting to see “a high number of walls in disarray or failure,” said Greg Berg, shore land specialist with the Stearns County Soil and Water Conservation District, who sits on the county’s shore land review panel.

Experts say in most cases, the walls aren’t needed to control erosion. Instead, they are a way for lakeshore owners to create a sand beach and a more level yard that can be mowed and manicured.

“They’re very elaborate,” said Dan Lais, area hydrologist with the state Department of Natural Resources. “Most of the time, people are just simply ignoring the rules and putting them in, and asking forgiveness later.”

Differing views

For some, neat, interlocking keystone walls and terraced yards are pleasing to the eye. But others say the walls ruin the wild beauty of the shoreline, destroy fish and wildlife habitat and increase the amount of pollutants that wash into the lake because they are not filtered first.

“It’s landscaping, and it typically alters the natural character of the shoreline,” Lais said.

Natural vegetation filters impurities far better than soil or mowed lawn can, said Marian Bender, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Minnesota Waters. Runoff from a mowed lawn can be as much as five to 10 times higher than from a natural shoreline, she said.

Still, landscaping companies continue to market “the look” — a sand beach, retaining wall and green manicured lawn — “that really is very hard on the lake,” Bender said.

State and county shore land rules allow retaining walls only as a last resort, when nothing else can control severe erosion. A shoreline alteration permit is required to do any work within the shore impact zone — typically 50-100 feet from the water’s edge, depending on how the lake is classified.

The number of people who make shore alterations without a permit seems to be on the rise, said Don Adams, Stearns County environmental services director.

That’s despite a major effort by the county, soil and water conservation districts and watershed districts to spread the word to lakeshore owners about the requirements, Adams said. The county also requires that contractors who work in shore land areas be licensed and get training every year.

“I don’t know if people are just willing to take a chance that they’re going to be approved,” Adams said.

The county often hears from upset neighbors about cases of landowners building a retaining wall or filling in a sand beach without a permit, he said.

“There are lots of eyes out there, and we usually hear about them from a neighbor or from somebody who has been on the lake and witnessed construction,” Adams said.

The landowners who are caught making major alterations without permission can apply for an after-the fact permit, which costs $370 plus a sliding fee of $515-$825, depending on how quickly the case is resolved.

Given that one recently built retaining wall had a price tag of $60,000, the penalty is “not much of a disincentive,” Adams said.

If the shore land review panel denies the permit, the landowner could be forced to restore the shore, which can be much more costly, he said.

Changing minds

State and local officials are encouraging homeowners to try other methods of restoring their shorelines, such as regrading the slope and planting native species.

So-called “bioengineering” — regrading and planting native trees and plants — is much preferred over building or replacing retaining walls, Adams said.

Despite its high-tech name, bioengineering is often simpler and less costly than a building retaining wall, Adams said.

The Galleas received $26,000 in grant money for their restoration project, which covered about 75 percent of the cost. Richard Gallea figures he easily would have spent $25,000 to remove the old wall and install a new one.

And there are benefits that can’t be measured in dollars, such as the colorful columbines and black-eyed Susans that bloom along the shore.

Gallea said he didn’t give up much. He can still see the lake and even kept a small area of sand by the dock where children can play. Keeping up with the weeding has been daunting, but that should get better now that the flowers are starting to take hold, he said.

Gallea said it’s an uphill battle to convince people that the groomed grass and tidy beach they grew up with isn’t the ideal.

“It’s going to take a while to really start converting people over to this other view,” Gallea said.