Joe Wagner is close enough to the wildlife refuge that snakes along the Minnesota River to be able to see it from where he farms.
"I'm outside all the time," he said, "and there's a mountain of mosquitoes. Three weeks after a big rain, we are inundated. And meanwhile there's hundreds of acres of wetlands that aren't being treated at all."
He is not the only member of the Scott County board who has complained over the years that a large and growing Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge — adding lots of acres and converting even more of them back to swamps — is growing a huge crop of insects.
In a summer that entomologists say is not off-the-charts bad but worse than some previous seasons, those grumbles are rising to the surface again.
Metro mosquito control district crews spend $17 million "and probably treat about 5 percent of what's out there, and you cannot measure their results," Wagner said, sounding about as heated as he ever gets. "What a scam! I love a great scam, and this is one of the best."
The district, however, maintains that it absolutely does measure results, meticulously so, right down to weekly bug counts and charts and graphs correlating those counts with citizen complaints.
So are things really that bad in rural Scott County, and are the Purity Police at the refuge in any way to blame?
Yes, maybe, sort of, in a certain sense, officials say.