LANCASTER — A member of the Speaker’s Task Force on Water Quality, Rep. Travis Tranel, expressed relief when one of the two investigators who conducted the Southwest Wisconsin Groundwater and Geology Study said in time, the results might show 30 percent contamination instead of the 42 percent initially reported.
“Well, at least we know the sky is not falling,” Tranel said. “If 30 percent of wells in the three-county area are contaminated, that’s bad and we have to fix it, but if the results are similar to the 1987 results in Iowa County, then it’s even possible that things may be improving.”
Tranel said this in front of more than 150 people who attended the first public hearing scheduled by the task force on May 8 in the large room of the University of Wisconsin-Extension Youth and Ag Building on the Grant County Fairgrounds in Lancaster.
Attendees included residents of surrounding counties, members of agriculture and conservation organizations, water quality experts, county conservationists from Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, Richland and Crawford Counties and 15 legislators who serve on the task force. Among them, local state representatives to the area included Republican Rep. Todd Novak of Dodgeville, co-chair of the task force alongside Stevens Point Democrat Rep. Kristina Shankland, Sen. Howard Marklein of Spring Green and Tranel, a Republican from Cuba City.
Tranel’s allusion to Henny Penny followed investigator Joel Stokdyk, who reported historic sampling in Iowa County in 1987 had shown about 30 percent of the wells to have signs of contamination.
“My best guess is that the SWIGG Study, once completed, will probably show similar results to the historic results for Iowa County,” Stokdyk replied. “However, the historic results in Iowa County weren’t as scientifically rigorous as the SWIGG Study.”
It was the release of the well testing results from round one of the SWIGG Study that prompted Re-publican Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos to found the task force. Those results revealed 42 percent of sampled wells were contaminated with nitrate or coliform bacteria.
Beverly Pestel of Richland Center, a retired chemistry professor, is part of the Richland Stewardship Project, a group of Richland County citizens working to educate neighbors about well water quality and local control. Pestel was the final speaker after hours of educational presentations and testimony from others and spoke directly to Tranel in regard to his comment.
“I spoke with a woman whose well testing results had come back with high nitrates,” Pestel said. “I had to advise her that, based upon the results, her well water was not safe to drink. Rep. Tranel, that woman’s sky has already fallen.”
The vast majority of time allotted at the hearing was given to representatives of larger farm operations and UW System researchers to speak to the panel and citizens present.
Members of the Lafayette Agricultural Stewardship Alliance were the first. In 2018, the group used the $10,000 granted by NC to make up the shortfall in paying for Lafayette County’s share of the SWIGG Study costs.
LASA President Jim Winn said water quality must be everyone’s focus.
“We all want clean water for our farms and for the community, and to achieve it, it will have to be a community effort,” Winn said. “A big part of our group’s efforts in 2019 will be incentivizing farmers to install best management practices in their farm operations.”
Lafayette County Conservationist Terry Loeffelholz, Grant County Conservationist Lynda Schweikert and Iowa County Conservationist Katie Abbott spoke about the issues facing them.
“One problem we at the county level face is that the State Department of Licensing staff are not in the field much,” Loeffelholz said.
Abbott explained that if the study is completed, it will likely lead to changes in well construction codes, septic system construction codes, manure management rules, incentivizing nitrogen best management practices and general incorporation of ground-water considerations into land use planning and zoning decisions. Schweikert said legislative support would be needed for changes in well and septic construction codes.
Abbott said funding from state conservation grants is insufficient for the counties to implement manure handling rules or zoning regulations and that the county lacks the money to complete the needed tri-county study.
“We’re ready to do more, and we need good data to point us to where the best places to focus our resources is,” Abbott said.
Others who represented large-scale farms said smaller farms are the culprit of contamination because they are not held to the same strict regulations. Some residents and farmers who spoke agreed that partnership with farmers would be necessary to ensure better water quality standards, noting cover crops and more sustainable practices would be an improvement. Charles Horn of Grant County, a retired DNR employee and a member of many conservation groups including Trout Unlimited, talked about how a CAFO near him had spilled 150,000 gallons of manure into Castle Rock Creek in February 2016.
Horn added that his wife, with no family history of cancer, had died of brain cancer in 2013. In the area surrounding the spill there is a cluster of cancers among his neighbors as well, he said.
“What I want to see from the legislature is more stringent WPDES standards, manure spreading restrictions, bonding of CAFO facilities for clean up, and adequate staffing of the State’s regulatory agencies,” Horn said.
At the end of the hours-long hearing, it was time for citizens to speak.
Michelle Robertson of Lafayette County said “everyone has a right to clean water,” and “self-regulation in many industries, like agriculture, just hasn’t worked.”
Lafayette County Board Supervisor Kriss Marion suggested groundwater mapping be included in the data set in SNAP Plus, a tool farmers use to plan nutrient management on their farms, adding that she supports Rep. Tranel’s grazing proposal.
“We can’t drill, filter or volunteer our way out of this crisis,” Marion said. “First, we need the science and data, and then we need to translate that into policy.”