Planning for the Future

Planning for long-term water sustainability

The Metropolitan Council continued to lead regional efforts to integrate water supply, wastewater, and water quality planning, shaping a sustainable path forward for the growing Twin Cities region.

The Met Council adopted Imagine 2050, the regional development guide for the Twin Cities region. Staff from across the Met Council collaborated with a multidisciplinary team of experts and community partners to develop the 2050 Water Policy Plan as part of this regional guide. The plan is tailored to address regional needs, guiding investments in local and regional water supply, wastewater, and water-quality management to support sustainable growth. It outlines the Met Council’s commitment to equitable water access, climate resilience, greenhouse gas mitigation, community partnerships, and water reuse and conservation.

The Met Council developed a water supply planning atlas to support planning and policy discussions and to serve as an outreach and education tool. The atlas compiles water supply data and information from state and federal agencies, local communities, and a variety of technical studies. It also organizes information by sub-regions— groups of neighboring communities connected by a combination of shared water challenges, hydrogeologic landscapes, and planning relationships established during previous planning cycles. The information helps communities communicate, collaborate, and better connect with regional plans, policies, and goals.

In 2023, the Met Council was directed by the Minnesota Legislature to develop a comprehensive plan to ensure communities in the metro region have access to sufficient, safe drinking water to support municipal growth while also safeguarding the sustainability of surface and ground water resources for future generations.
In early 2024, a work group with representatives from local communities and several agencies was formed to advise the Met Council in this comprehensive plan for the northeast metro area. The work group developed an overall goal for the project: to ensure access to sufficient, safe, and affordable drinking water for all communities in the northeast metro. The work group has been meeting to prioritize studies that need to be completed to help develop the recommendations in the report.
The White Bear Lake Area Comprehensive plan developed recommendations to ensure that communities in the region continue to have reliable, safe drinking water to allow for municipal growth.

Investing in resilient infrastructure

Our infrastructure serves more than 2.8 million residents across 111 communities every day, and maintaining its reliability requires thoughtful planning, continuous improvement, and adaptation to changing conditions. This year, we made strategic investments to upgrade aging assets, improve system performance, and prepare for future challenges, including population growth, climate change, and evolving regulatory requirements.

The Met Council plans to build a new water resource recovery facility in the northwestern part of the region to replace the existing Rogers facility. The proposed Crow River Water Resource Recovery Facility will feature technologies that reduce energy use, manage stormwater, and recover heat from effluent just before it is returned to the environment.
The facility will also create opportunities to reuse treated wastewater both on-site and off-site for commercial and agricultural irrigation as well as evaporative cooling for data centers and manufacturing.

In 2024, the Met Council continued evaluating several proposed data centers to determine our ability to meet wastewater service needs, both pipe capacity and treatment. High heat generating computing centers must be cooled, so in some cases, the Met Council assessed its ability to provide reclaimed wastewater effluent for these cooling needs. In nearly all cases, the final decision for cooling these facilities resulted in either using air-cooled processes or municipal water supply sources. Air cooling greatly reduces the amount of wastewater that must be discharged into the regional wastewater system. The Met Council is currently conducting a study to evaluate the impact that potential post-cooling water might have on the treatment process at regional wastewater reclamation facilities and conducting policy research on the environmental and water supply impacts of datacenters.

Innovating water reuse and resource recovery

As water challenges grow more complex, we’re reimagining how we manage and recover water. In 2024, we expanded our work, finding new ways to reuse water, recover valuable resources, and reduce environmental impacts across the region.

At our Eagles Point Water Resource Recovery Facility, we conducted a demonstration project focused on energy savings from low-dissolved oxygen (LDO) operation, which received the Resource and Recovery Energy Award from the Central States Water Environment Association. The award recognizes projects that contribute to energy savings in wastewater treatment across the region. An important aspect of the team's ongoing demonstration at the Eagles Point facility is fully investigating the impact of operation in the LDO mode. As with most things, there are trade-offs and impacts. Operating at LDO can worsen the settling characteristics of microorganisms and potentially reduce their growth rate, both of which may limit the volume of wastewater the facility can treat. The team is conducting studies of these issues to help determine what volume of influent flow would require the facility to have to return to normal LDO operation. These studies provide groundbreaking fundamental understanding of an emerging innovation.