The City of Eden Prairie has developed a water quality improvement plan for Staring Lake that includes efforts to reduce nutrient inputs to the lake through a series of pond improvement projects that direct stormwater to the lake.

One project beginning in January 2014 is the installation of a relatively new stormwater treatment system called an Iron-Enhanced Filtration Bench (IEFB). The City has received two grants to help fund this project, a Clean Water Fund (CWF) grant from the Board of Water and Soil Resources and a Natural Resource Incentives for Critical Habitat (NRICH) grant from Hennepin County.

An IEFB can be very effective with removing a common pollutant in stormwater, phosphorus. Phosphorus comes from many sources, including lawn fertilizers. A trench will be installed along the side of the stormwater pond and drain tile installed at the bottom of the trench. The drain tile will be connected to an outlet structure that carries water out of the pond. During and after rainfall events, the stormwater runoff will fill the pond and then spill into the IEFB trench, where it will filter through an iron and sand mixture, removing a significant amount of phosphorus. The filtered water then flows across the drain tile and downstream to Staring Lake.

An educational sign will be installed in a parking lot south of Staring Lake Parkway and south of Oak Point Elementary in summer 2014 to showcase the new IEFB trench.