MURRAY COUNTY — State funding will be making a big difference for some infrastructure projects in southwest Minnesota – including flood mitigation efforts on Lake Shetek, Murray County staff said.

A proposal to raise dikes and widen a county road on Lake Shetek received $4.2 million in funding, as part of a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill passed this spring.

“It’s a project that we’ve wanted to do for many years,” said Murray County Engineer Randy Groves. “Since the flood in 2018, we saw the need even more.”

Extreme rains saturated southwest Minnesota in 2018, and the downpour of water raised the level of Lake Shetek. Flooding damaged homes, and temporarily cut off access to islands on the lake.

Now that they have help from state funding, Groves said the Murray County highway department is planning to raise three dikes on Lake Shetek enough to prevent the same kind of flooding they saw in 2018. At the same time, the project would widen Murray County Road 13, which runs along the top of the dikes.

Groves said the amount of foot and bike traffic sharing the road with vehicles in summer was a “huge” safety concern. Having a wider roadway with shoulders would help address the problem.

Although the traffic safety and flooding concerns on County Road 13 were serious, raising the dikes would have been cost prohibitive, Groves said. With support from state infrastructure funding, planning in the project can move ahead.

Groves said many of the design details of the project have not been worked out yet. At this point, the county has done preliminary studies, and they know the general design they want, he said.

Actual construction on the project would not start before 2025, Groves said. “We’re going to try to work with a construction firm on how it will be built,” he said. One of the challenges facing the project will be how to do the construction work while still allowing access to the islands connected by the dikes and County Road 13. “It’s the only way in or out of that area,” he said.

“I think people are excited,” Groves said of the project moving forward. Area residents, including members of the Shetek Area Lake Association, were supportive of the improvements. “They were very involved,” he said.

Groves said Murray County had two funding requests that went to the state legislature this year, but only the Lake Shetek project request was approved. The request that didn’t get funding would have helped construct a new building for the Murray County highway department in Slayton. Groves said that project would have replaced an existing building that dates back to the 1950s. “We just needed to build something newer and more efficient,” he said.