Mississippi River Border Waters Regulations Implementation

The new regulations that were jointly developed by the MN DNR and WI DNR after the two rounds of joint public input meetings (May-July 2018 and November 2018) are scheduled to go into effect this spring.

Final publication of the regulations to the state register in MN occurred Monday Feb 24th. The 2020 Regulations books containing the new regulations are being distributed to DNR offices and license sale points at this time.

New regulations will go into effect on the MN side of the river on March 1st, 2020. see attachment for a summary

Wisconsin regulation are on track for implementation on April 1st, 2020 at this time.

For the month of March 2020 there will be a split river condition with regulations differing between states. Anglers who choose to follow the new regulations should not have any issues angling on either side of the river, but anglers utilizing the old regulations in Wisconsin waters need to be aware of what they have in their livewells if moving on to fish in MN waters as they will fall under the new regulations then.

Thanks to all who took the time to provide input during the various phases of this process.

Hopefully water levels will cooperate and everyone can enjoy a successful spring fishing season.

Stay safe on the water, and as always feel free to contact me or the other staff at the Lake City Fisheries Office if you have any questions.

Attachments:

1. 2020-All-species-regulation-table.pdf

At this point there is no active effort to review the regulations for the St. Croix portion of the border. The East Metro or Hinkley Area Fisheries offices would be the places to contact if you want to express support for a review.

To address the issue of launching in areas with different regulations: like in similar situations elsewhere in the state you can proceed directly back to your access point without stopping if you have to traverse an area with more restrictive regulations than what you were fishing under.

Hey Chuck,

The link below is to another post on IDO about the Iowa efforts to bring their Walleye Regulation up to the Minnesota border on the Mississippi. There will likely still be differences that occur at the Iowa/Minnesota border you need to be aware of. That is one of the difficulties of lateral management of a longitudinal resource. Early in the process we worked with Iowa and they expressed an interest in extending the slot limit they use for walleye to the Minnesota border. In an effort to give that regulation a “hard” border we applied it to our short section of Pool 9 as well bringing it op to LD8.

I am sure there are opportunities to express to Iowa your interest in similar or matching regulations in that section of river.

Keep your eyes open for postings or news releases from Wisconsin as they are more likely to explain the details for the WI/IA shared border. If you have further questions don’t hesitate to contact me.

Nick

https://www.in-depthoutdoors.com/community/forums/topic/walleye-regs-iowa-wisconsin-border-request-comments-move-to-same-as-il-ia-miss/

Thank you for all your hard work and the time! Sure seems like everything is going in a good direction.

This thread was locked to keep the announcement clean.

For comments, please uses This Thread.

Bump