Both the House and Senate provide $128,000 a year for the operating budget at Farmamerica, the agricultural interpretive center east of Waseca. The amount matches what was provided in the last two-year state budget approved by the 2005 Legislature.

St. Peter museum

The Treaty Site History Center, the museum on the north edge of St. Peter along Highway 169, would receive $100,000 under the Senate budget and $150,000 under the House version. In each case, the funding would be to create the central exhibit for the museum, something that was never completed because of funding shortages when the building was built 13 years ago.

Officials from the Nicollet County Historical Society requested $150,000.

Business adviser

The Riverbend Center for Enterprise Facilitation, a program founded by Blue Earth County to help would-be entrepreneurs get started on the right track, gets $63,000 under the House’s economic development budget bill. The bill also provides $63,000 for Martin and Faribault counties to establish similar programs there.

Each of the programs would have to report to the state the number of customers served and statistics about jobs created or retained because of their efforts.

Lake Titloe

The Senate’s one-time appropriations bill, which spends some of the non-reoccurring budget surplus on one-time projects, provides $200,000 to the city of Gaylord to help clean up the waters of Lake Titloe. The funds would help the city construct storm sewers to divert water from city streets into holding ponds rather than directly into the polluted lake.

The House and Senate both provided $150,000 in their bonding bills for the design of holding ponds upstream from the lake, ponds that would help reduce the agricultural chemicals and sediment entering Titloe.

The bonding bills also have $15,000 for tile covers that trap sediments before they enter field tile.

Rapidan Dam

The House environmental and natural resources budget bill includes $60,000 to cover the state share of a $199,000 study of Blue Earth County’s Rapidan Dam.

The study would be the first phase a $1 million study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that would likely determine the future of the 97-year-old dam on the Blue Earth River.