Playing politics with PFAS crisis is cowardly

MADISON – In a return to late night, last-minute tactics just before the end of the Assembly’s session, GOP legislators hastily wrote and passed a pitiful amendment to an already inadequate bill and are now claiming it as a victory over potentially deadly PFAS pollution.

Clean Water Legislation has been a major issue in the capitol this year. One effective model for people concerned with issues in our legislature is citizen lobbying. On Jan. 30 I took a trip with the citizen lobbyists from the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters as they lobbied their legislators for better clean water laws. 

Governor Evers declared 2019 the year of clean water in Wisconsin. Throughout the year meetings were conducted across the state of the Speaker's Water Quality Task Force, which heard testimony from organizations and individuals.

At yesterday's Wisconsin Farmers Union Summer Conference Governor Evers spoke about different clean water initiatives in the state, and the need to improve and protect water quality. One irony of the day was that while we were all talking about clean water at the conference, we had to keep the kids at the camp event out of the water at the lovely beach at Kamp Kenwood because the lake was suffering from the same blue-green algae bloom being seen at multiple sites across the state.

One main focus of the 2019 Wisconsin Farmers Union Summer Conference was clean water. The conference this year featured a demonstration of water runoff from different kinds of farming practices. The demonstration was done by Pheasants Forever and showed how modern farming practices can limit water runoff and loss of nutrients while ensuring more of the rainfall actually infiltrates the soil.

State of State Address Again Ignores Reality

Clean Water Forum, November 27

7PM in Dunn County Judicial Center 615 Stokke Pkwy, Menomonie

This forum was informative as well as discouraging. Panelists are listed below, and all gave impassioned defenses of water in Wisconsin. We continue to believe that clean water is a finite resource in the state (or at least our legislature believes this) as we continue to retrench on the Wisconsin policy of preserving water and our environment.