Chris Hahn

Original article published in the Mower County Independent, Thursday, March 21, 2024.   Reprinted with permission and gratitude.

By Gretchen Mensink Lovejoy

 

One community.

Thirty-three tons of help.

“We distributed almost 33 tons of food in 2023 to people in need,” related Spring Valley Area Food Shelf volunteer Carol Gross, sharing that the local food pantry has done exactly what it was meant to do – meet the needs of people whose incomes do not have meeting ends.

The food shelf, founded in 2008, is a work of the Spring Valley Area Ministerial Association and is currently housed in a building just off East Jefferson Street in downtown Spring Valley. Current Spring Valley Area Food Shelf board members are Carol Gross, Rita Hartert, Steve Heusinkveld, Sharon Jahn, Maureen Johnson, Gail Rollie and Pastors Mark and Deanna Woodward, and Geraldine Williams serves as bookkeeper. Board members and others who assist do so on an entirely volunteer basis, but they spend hour upon hour serving their neighbors through the functions of the food shelf – shopping with food shelf clients, working during shopping hours, sanitizing the food shelf’s busier corners, attending informational meetings, unloading delivery trucks, holding monthly meetings, and more.

The pantry’s 2023 annual report elaborated, “The Spring Valley Area Food Shelf serves the needs of residents within primarily a 15-mile radius of Spring Valley and is located at 102 E. Jefferson Street.” Statistics listed for last year’s visits were included in the report, and it cited, “An average of 84 households, or 201 people, used the food shelf each month in 2023, a 58 percent increase over 2022. Shoppers are allowed one visit per month to supplement their food supplies but are never turned away if more food is needed in a certain month. Forty-two percent of households served are composed of one person. Of our total shoppers per month, 14 percent are seniors, 32 percent are children, and the rest are adults 19-64. It should be noted that some households do not use the food shelf every month. The number of shoppers and the amount of food per month increased significantly in the last six months of the year. An average of 65 pounds of food per household was distributed.”

Last year, the Spring Valley Area Food Shelf’s expenses totaled $51,983.62, including rent, local food purchases at Kwik Trip, Sunshine Foods and Dollar General, as well as shelf stable milk not available for local purchase bought from Channel One. Kwik Trip gave weekly food donations picked up by volunteers, Sunshine Foods and Dollar General have ongoing food collection boxes picked up by volunteers, Sunshine Foods gives a discount on all purchases, and meat selections were made at Sunshine Foods, Valley Butchery and Ody’s Country Meats. In addition to donations from churches, monetary, food and other donations were received from the Kingsland district students, a donor gave hams to spur a challenge to the community to donate hams given through a drawing, cattlemen donated ground beef, and one community member generously delivered $2,000 worth of meat to the food shelf so that others may have enough protein on their tables. Furthermore, community members who used Thrivent Action Team projects, along with the July Open Your Heart campaign that garnered $10,850, have made a significant difference for the food shelf.

And the report relayed that “while our expenses exceeded income for the year, our checkbook balance at the beginning of the year and generous donations during and at the end of the year continue to give us a working balance.” That money recirculates through local grocery outlets — Gross noted that shopping locally helps keep the economy strong and builds relationships with business owners and managers. “We spent more than twice as much buying food in Spring Valley than we did buying food from Channel One.” T

he food shelf’s ongoing wish list likely includes laundry detergent, toilet paper, paper towels, soap, dish soap, canned goods, boxed dinners such as Hamburger Helper or macaroni and cheese, peanut butter, jelly, canned soup, canned fruit, juice, rice, tuna, baking supplies – flour, sugar, cake mixes and beyond, and bumper crop garden produce. As Gross pointed out, cash is especially useful as volunteers go shopping to fill carts with even more food than can be bought using the same amount of money spent by someone shopping at the grocery store and giving purchased foods to the food shelf. She stated, “We are also participating in Minnesota FoodShare Month during March, meaning that the amount of food and money donated during the month is partially matched by Minnesota Food Share.”

The Spring Valley Area Food Shelf is located at 102 E. Jefferson St. and is open Wednesdays from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., as well as from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on Saturdays. For more information, log onto the Spring Valley city website or stop in during operating hours to register for assistance or to volunteer. The 2023 report concluded, “The food shelf continues because of the monetary and food generosity of so many – and countless – volunteer hours.”

 

Courtesy of the Mower County Independent, 135 E Main St. LeRoy, MN 55951, (507)-324-5325

Original article published in the Mower County Independent, Thursday, March 7, 2024.   Reprinted with permission and gratitude.

By Gretchen Mensink Lovejoy

 

Spring Valley’s city council heard proposals for upgrades to its wastewater treatment plant during the February regular council meeting. Councilors welcomed Bolton & Menk engineers Drew Weber and Jake Pichelmann to the council chambers to share how the plant might function more efficiently, as it is nearly 40 years old and needs its parts brought up to specifications of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and other environmental oversight entities.

Pichelmann introduced the topic by citing that “a lot of the infrastructure” of Spring Valley’s underground water services is “70, 80 to 100 years old,” and he compared the maintenance of such to a homeowner who must maintain a home by installing replacement water heaters and furnaces as they wear out. He noted that “there are new limits at the PCA and a compliance schedule to meet new nitrogen limits by 2031, and you’re on the clock.” Spring Valley’s 2021 city council had discussed the matter of rehabilitating the plant, but progress apparently stalled, and the work was not done. Pichelmann related that the MPCA listed that the plant presently does not meet phosphorus processing standards and that “excessive inflow and infiltration (I&I)” were also at risk of overloading the plant’s ability to handle its work when storm water flows in and overtakes its capacity.

The circa-1987 plant has a 20-year facility plan that is meant to set the city up to accommodate population projections for Spring Valley’s needs as the years progress, and the engineers affirmed that the current capacity is “excess capacity” because the plant is “at about 50 percent capacity” at this moment. Councilor Greg Brooks inquired of the engineers, “Are we where we need to be?” They countered that “you’re not building new capacity…you’re meeting nitrogen limits,” meaning that essentially, anything done to the plant will be to bring it to compliance with MPCA and national water standards.

The engineers explained that the funding for the facility upgrades would have three options – the Clean Water Revolving Fund would be a possibility, as would the Point Source Water Fund – and that the options or alternatives were to first do plant-wide rehabilitation and update equipment systems and data acquisition and do site restoration, or to take option two, which would offer process upgrades and a settling basis with more operator control, and option three, which, according to Pichelmann, would be to “do nothing, which is not viable because of new regulations…you are on about a seven-year schedule.” The project would “address a failing system…the goal is to create a watertight system.”

They acknowledged that Spring Valley’s city council has been proactive in maintaining its street infrastructure but has not raised water user rates to those commensurate with neighboring communities’, citing that increased user rates might climb between $70 and $80 per month from $40 but that grants could supplement the cost of any work that drives costs up above $80. Replacement cost of an entire wastewater plant would stand “between $30 million to $35 million,” but the concepts they had in mind were set to address problems without incurring that same expense.

Weber and Pichelmann concluded by sharing the potential timeline, highlighting that submission of grants and preliminary plans should have been completed by the beginning of March, after which the preliminary list of items being improved will be brought forward by June, followed by the final list in October. The exact date of construction would be determined after that, but the ultimate compliance deadline is Jan. 1, 2031. The councilors later approved the wastewater facility plan’s first stages.

 

Courtesy of the Mower County Independent, 135 E Main St. LeRoy, MN 55951, (507)-324-5325

Original article published in the Mower County Independent, Thursday, February 29, 2024.   Reprinted with permission and gratitude.

By Gretchen Mensink Lovejoy

 

Kiwanis Club has honored Catie Emig as a Kiwanis Academic Award recipient. She is the daughter of Chuck and Maranda Emig.

The Kingsland senior is active in band, choir, robotics, drama club as a stage technician, and National Honor Society (NHS). “I enjoy robotics the most,” she commented, adding that she “used to be in dance when the school still had a team.” “My favorite subject is math, and my least favorite subject is English.”

Outside of school, she’s chosen not to take on so many things that she could be overwhelmed with them. “I’m usually so busy with school activities that I don’t do much outside of school or extracurriculars. I don’t have a job because I’m focusing on school and extracurriculars. I enjoy reading, knitting and listening to music, and I once knitted a large 60-inch scarf in three days while I was sick. My favorite movie is ‘Spirited Away’. I don’t really have a specific reason for liking it – it’s just a really good movie. I could never choose a favorite book out of all of the books I have read, but ‘Dracula’ was the most recent book I have read that I enjoyed. I listen to almost every genre of music, but my favorite genre is rock.” She continued, “I hate it when people talk unnecessarily loud near me. I could live on pasta for the rest of my life, but I’m not a fan of super spicy foods.”

If she could travel to any country in the world for free, she’d choose Spain. “I would travel to Spain to see if can actually remember anything I learned from my three years of Spanish classes, and if I could travel to any state, I would travel to Hawaii because I’d enjoy the warm weather and I want to see the ocean.”

The 18-year-old most admires her parents. “I admire my dad because he is always able to help me when I need it. I admire my mom because she is able to stand up for what she believes and understand the emotions of others.”

Catie’s career aspirations have changed since she was little. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a teacher. I want to go into computer science after I graduate because I enjoy working with computers.”

The Kiwanis recognized Catie and her parents during a late January luncheon meeting.

 

Courtesy of the Mower County Independent, 135 E Main St. LeRoy, MN 55951, (507)-324-5325