Editor’s note: This is one of six “Voices for the River” chapters from For Love of a River: The Minnesota by Darby Nelson with John Hickman, editor. Published by Beaver’s Pond Press 2019. All rights reserved. Redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited.
Voices for the River: Ed Crozier and Elaine Mellott
Just think, just over the lip of that airport, with the highways going by, and yet – a tremendous, tremendous wildlife area.
―Walter Mondale
As we paddled into the Twin Cities metropolitan area, Geri checked the map. It showed that between state and city recreation areas and the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, 50 of the 55 miles from Belle Plaine to the mouth of the river at Fort Snelling is bordered by public land. (There is a stretch of industrialized floodplain in Savage and Burnsville.) These public lands enable paddlers and hikers to experience both the terrestrial and aquatic life of the river. Who were the voices for the river and its valley who enabled this to happen? Why was this stretch of the river never “developed”?
Theodore Wirth, Superintendent of the Minneapolis Park System in 1935, was one of the earliest voices pushing for public access to this part of the Minnesota River Basin. He recommended that the Lower Minnesota Valley be established as a metropolitan park from Shakopee to Fort Snelling, where the Minnesota joins the Mississippi. The powers-that-be declined to act on Wirth’s recommendation. Most of the valley remained unprotected, although Fort Snelling State Park was established in 1961.
Forty years after Wirth advocated preserving the Minnesota Valley in the metropolitan area, two inspired individuals made it happen. Ed Crozier, Bloomington resident and veteran manager in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, joined his city’s Natural Resources Commission, which had been established to examine the impact of development and land-use decisions on the city’s natural resources – including the Minnesota River which forms its entire southern boundary. The chair of the commission at the time was Elaine Mellott. Mellott had been advocating on behalf of the Minnesota River since at least 1964, when she participated in meetings led by fellow Voice for the River Clyde Ryberg about creating the Minnesota River Valley Trail. Ed’s decision to join the Natural Resources Commission – thereby meeting Elaine – was to play a critical role in the creation of a national wildlife refuge in the Lower Minnesota Valley.
When Ed and his family moved across the river to Burnsville in 1970, he met Dick Duerre, a kindred spirit who chaired a citizens’ group called the Burnsville Environmental Council. Freeway Landfill, on the west side of the river at Interstate 35W, was asking for renewal of their permit to continue operations in the floodplain. The Burnsville Environmental Council opposed it, but the Burnsville City Council renewed the permit regardless. Today, the landfill is an EPA Superfund site, and the cost to prevent it from polluting groundwater and the river with illegally dumped hazardous wastes is estimated at $47 million.*
They were losing individual battles to protect the river bottoms, so Duerre and Crozier decided they needed a more comprehensive approach. Crozier devised a cunning plan: he anonymously wrote a proposal for a national wildlife recreation area in the lower Minnesota River Valley. Duerre signed the proposal and sent it to the Minnesota Congressional delegation and the President. In response, Congressman Bill Frenzel asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assess the proposal’s feasibility. Fortuitously (though not unexpectedly), the assignment was given to the chief of the Regional Wildlife Refuge Planning Office, who just so happened to be none other than Ed Crozier. As you might guess, the Planning Office concluded that the proposal was indeed feasible.
But bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior in Washington, who had the ultimate say-so, had zero interest in what they considered an outlandish idea to establish a refuge in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Being well familiar with federal bureaucracy, Ed knew that their plan would never become reality unless they could bypass the bureaucrats and appeal directly to Congress. As a federal employee, however, Ed was prevented from making such an appeal himself. Only citizens could lobby Congress.
So Ed quietly, strategically reached back across the river to Elaine Mellott and asked her to chair a citizen committee to promote the plan. She agreed with great enthusiasm. Her friend Marialice Seal joined her, and together they organized and co-chaired the Lower Minnesota River Valley Citizens Committee. They made presentations to service clubs, sportsmen’s organizations, units of government, and other local groups. With the OK from his superiors, Ed accompanied Elaine and Marialice as a technical advisor. In this way, forty organizations from Carver to Fort Snelling became aware of the project, press coverage proliferated, and the idea to create a refuge along the river gathered steam.
The Citizens Committee engaged TRC Productions to produce a program using two slide projectors and a synchronized audio tape – the 1970s version of a fancy PowerPoint presentation. Ed writes, “The media production equipment was so heavy, it became difficult to use and we were ready to abandon it.” But, as Ed puts it, “The river spirit was looking out for the refuge. One night hauling all this weight back to the office, we found a two-wheeled cart lying in the middle of the road, apparently having fallen off a truck.” The campaign continued.
Even so, it became clear that to succeed, people in high places would have to be brought into the effort. Elaine was a senior consultant for public affairs at the prestigious Control Data Corporation (CDC), which enabled her to put on presentations for bigwigs at the CDC board room overlooking the river valley.
And CDC executives were more than happy to host meetings attended by influential individuals such as Senator Walter Mondale. Ed writes that after one such meeting, executives spoke informally with the Senator and explicitly supported the idea. Similar expressions of support were voiced at a public hearing Mondale convened, and that convinced him to sponsor legislation establishing the refuge. He assigned one of his staff people, Gail Harrison, to work on the project. One of her most effective strategies was to keep river-dependent barge and grain interests and Northern States Power (now Xcel Energy, which has a power plant on the river) in the loop to make sure their concerns were addressed.
On July 11, 1975, Senators Mondale and Hubert Humphrey introduced Public Law 94–466: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the “‘Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge Act.”’ Mondale recruited Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky as co-sponsor, who, as Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, added extra gravitas. Meanwhile, Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar provided the necessary leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives. The subcommittee he chaired couldn’t propose a wildlife recreation area as Ed had originally envisioned, but it could propose a national wildlife refuge.
A further impetus came unexpectedly on August 29, 1976, when President Gerald Ford released an announcement that thrilled the environmental community across the nation. He called for Congress to pass a bicentennial Land Heritage Act, a ten-year, $1.5-billion-dollar program that would double both the existing funds and the acreage of recreation areas and wildlife sanctuaries, giving a huge boost for funding the Lower Minnesota River Valley efforts.
Between Ed’s proposal, citizens’ strong advocacy and congressional and presidential support, the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge became a reality in 1976. At the time, it was one of only four urban wildlife refuges in the nation. And the establishment of the Minnesota Valley refuge was distinctive in two other ways. First, almost all national wildlife refuges are created through an appropriation in the budget of the U.S. Department of the Interior, not through a discrete Act of Congress. Second, Ed made sure that a focus on public education be mandated in the legislation; most wildlife refuges have a singular emphasis on protection and enhancement of wildlife.
Many people and organizations made passage of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge Act possible, but Ed writes that the real heroes were Elaine Mellott and Marialice Seal, who persevered and faced the toughest battles in the effort. The Act of Congress that created the refuge provided funds to acquire only some of the originally authorized 9,000 acres, so Mellott, Seal and their allies kept up their efforts for many years, advocating for the federal funding required to purchase all the authorized land. Without them and Gail Harrison from Mondale’s staff, there would be no refuge. In subsequent years, Senator David Durenberger was supportive. It helped that Elaine was a good friend of Durenberger’s environmental aide, Shirley Hunt Alexander. Thanks to Elaine, Marialice, Shirley and those who have followed in their footsteps, the endeavor has been so successful that the refuge today has grown to more than 14,500 acres, all of it purchased from willing landowners and all of it freely available to the public.
In 1982, the original citizens group started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Friends of the Minnesota Valley that is still going strong today. Its original purposes were to advocate for federal funding for land acquisition and, in general, support the refuge. A highlight was securing funds for a beautiful visitor center, which opened in 1989 with the help of Congressman Martin Olav Sabo. Beginning in the early 1990s, with a grant from the McKnight Foundation, the Friends expanded its environmental efforts into the entire basin, with an emphasis on the Lower Minnesota watershed. Friends of the Minnesota Valley was the very first refuge “Friends” group; today there are hundreds across the nation.
Ed received the Department of Interior’s top two awards primarily for his work to establish the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. He retired in 1994 but has never stopped advocating on behalf of the river. Elaine is no longer with us but her passion, powers of persuasion, and love of the Minnesota River continue to inspire those who were fortunate enough to have known her.
Were it not for Ed and Elaine, there’s no telling what Geri and I would have seen as we paddled through the metropolitan area. We are grateful to have paddled through a national wildlife refuge.
** Recently, the Burnsville City Council expressed support for a plan to dig up the landfill and transfer its contents to a new, expanded location just downriver. Actually, “landfill” isn’t quite the right term; the plan is to, literally, build a mountain of garbage that would be the tallest structure for miles around. Ed has been a vocal opponent of the plan.
