Wisconsin Peninsula Is Breathtaking, but Don't Drink the Water

This manure-filled water came directly from Kewaunee County
residents Erika and Rob Balza’s kitchen faucet. Drinking the
water would lead to a visit to the hospital.

Wisconsin is becoming the state of fecal freaks and the manure mob

At a public hearing on factory farms held in Luxemburg in northeastern Wisconsin's peninsula this week, the public sentiment is clear: No more factory farms, we want clean water.

But factory farm corporations backed by the Scott Walker administration don't care what people want and think.

This is what Wisconsin has become in the lost decade, 2011-2019.

Reports Paul Srubas in the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin newspapers:

[S]eaker after speaker got up to the microphone to call [factory farm corporations] greedy and accuse them of destroying the environment.

About 170 people gathered at the Kewaunee Fairgrounds to give or listen to testimony at a hearing by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources over whether to issue a permit for a new Concentrated Animal Feed Operation and reissue five-year permits to four existing CAFO farms. ...

Several representatives of an environmental group in Door County spoke, as did a lawyer from Midwest Environmental Advocates in Madison, and several area town board and county supervisors.

Most of the speakers were just area residents.

Residents, in other words people and families. But families' clean and safe water is not the concern of the Walker administration and the fecal freaks whom the administration represents.

Wisconsin's first assembly
district is the peninsula jutting
out into Lake Michigan
in northeastern Wisconsin.
The district is in a water
crisis caused by manure
vectored into drinking
water by factory farms.
The current state rep.
Joel Kitchens, (R), works
for the water poisoners,
the factory farms.

Writes a clean water ally in central Wisconsin, Don Ystad:

Fellow concerned citizens,

This ends with us! When Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce teams up with the Dairy Business Association to fight rules to keep manure out of the public's water, you know they have overstepped.  While we expect them to be business-focused, we would also expect them to be reasonable when it comes to protections for those of us relying on clean water throughout the state. In other words, promote business, but not at the expense of human health and well being.

The irony of this is that they use their profits from doing business with you to work against you.

Here is an opportunity to link arms with your neighbors and show up in Madison to make a statement. You may not have the financial resources they have, but you can at least show up and make a statement. I plan to, and hope you will as well. See the League of Conservation Voters announcement linked to sign up.

Don Ystad for Concerned Rome, Wisconsin Citizens

Wisconsin Lead Pipes Threaten Water, GOP Pushes Anti-clean Water Laws

Silke Schmidt and Dee J. Hall report from the Center for Investigative Journalism shows Wisconsin is poised to become home to "abundant" Flint, Michigans as Wisconsin's Republican governor is actively pursuing a bizarre, anti-clean water approach to water protection.

The public interest law firm, Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA), has filed a "complaint in Dane County Circuit Court against the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for violating state open records laws by unreasonably delaying DNR responses to MEA open records requests."

Scott Walker is pursuing polices to literally toxify Wisconsin waters, and Walker is shutting down public scrutiny to his administration's complicity with the polluters.

Meanwhile, Walker and Republicans are selling out the peoples' water to corporate interests, (Viste, Door County Pulse).

In Sturgeon Bay in northeastern Wisconsin, citizens are fighting more sell-off of Wisconsin waters to private and polluting developers, (Alyssa Bloechl and Warren Bluhm, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin).

Enviro Firm Files Open Records Complaint Against Wisconsin DNR

"Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA) filed a complaint in Dane County Circuit Court against the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for violating state open records laws by unreasonably delaying DNR responses to MEA open records requests. The law center based its complaint on three separate, outstanding open records requests: one related to air, the second to a group of wetlands permits, and the third regarding concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs," reads a news release from MEA.

Secrecy is of course big in the Scott Walker administration, the least transparent in Wisconsin history.

Citizen Groups Appeal to EPA to Protect Wisconsin Water

"Earth is a water planet. Though the stock of water is finite, fully 70% of the Earth's surface is covered in water. Freshwater, however, is far less abundant, accounting for less than than 3% of the total, of which less than 1% is in the form of readily exploited lakes (0.009%), rivers (0.0001%), and accessible groundwater (0.31%)."
—Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics, Principles and Applications (Island Press,) (2004, 2011); p. 87)
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Bill Berry in the Capital Times reports on the future of water in Wisconsin, and the unprecedented abdication by our state government (run by Republicans) handing over surface and ground water to the polluters.

What to do with our life blood protected by the Wisconsin Constitution, asks Berry?:

So, who will decide? Politicians, with or without science? Courts? Special interests? Stay tuned, and keep your eye on the powerful citizen groups that have sprung up pretty much on their own. They may be the best hope for a reasonable solution.

Fully comprehending the scope of Scott Walker's project of giving away Wisconsin water to the polluters is beyond the comprehension of many citizens—so fast, so completely and astonishingly has the Walker administration abandoned clean and fresh water.

This is being met with a massive legal offensive today:

Petition to EPA: Wisconsin’s Fails to Comply with Clean Water Act

Oct 20, 2015

Today, on behalf of 16 Petitioners from across the state of Wisconsin, Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a Petition for Corrective Action with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to request action by both federal and state agencies to bring Wisconsin back into compliance with the Clean Water Act. Wisconsin citizens petitioning the EPA have long-standing water problems from poor implementation and enforcement of the landmark federal law.

“Today, Petitioners are exercising a right granted by federal law to ask the EPA to require our state Department of Natural Resources to issue water pollution permits in compliance with the Clean Water Act,” said Staff Attorney Tressie Kamp. “If our DNR and state legislators do not take timely action, the Petition asks that the EPA take back the DNR’s power to issue permits to industries that discharge pollutants into Wisconsin’s waters.”

In 2011, the EPA sent a letter to the DNR outlining 75 points where the state government was out of compliance with the federal Clean Water Act through a lack of clear or effective implementation, enforcement or proper legal authority for the state. Since then, changes in the agency’s rulemaking process, staffing and authority within the agency’s water pollution permitting program, and circumvention of court-ordered pollution controls, in addition to cuts in the agency’s budget and science staff, have all culminated in this urgent, statewide call for action. The Petition requests that the EPA works with the DNR to establish enforceable timelines for compliance.

“The Petition for Corrective Action is important and justified because it’s been over four years—and in some instances, much longer—since the EPA put our DNR on notice that Wisconsin does not issue water pollution permits in full compliance with the federal laws that protect clean water all over our country,” said Kamp.

“The Governor and state legislature have starved the DNR’s power and robbed the agency’s experienced staff of professional autonomy to make informed decisions,” said Executive Director Kimberlee Wright. “Today, this drastically narrowed authority of DNR staff to make critical decisions about protecting our water requires urgent action by the EPA. Without effective government, we are compounding what our children and grandchildren will face in a world increasingly short of drinking water.”
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For more information on the petition.
#

Don't Look Back, Saying 'We Should Have Done Something'

Big Ag - The Report from the Dairy State

In Wisconsin under Scott Walker's reign, the range of issues applicable to this headline is wide.

Don Ystad of Nekoosa in northern Adams county is referring to the proposed massive Wysocki Golden Sands, industrialized diary, the CAFO factory model.

Writes Ystad:

As many are reporting, the practice of confining many thousands of cows in a CAFO and then spreading the millions of gallons of manure is ruining our ground and surface water.  In Kewaunee County, with its 16 dairy CAFOs, one third of private drinking water wells are unusable because of manure runoff  from the CAFOs. These are not people attacking family farmers, they are citizens reporting on the resulting environmental damage that occurs from these industrial farms. Here in Rome and Saratoga, we are a population-dense recreational/residential area facing the same kind of issues if the Golden Sands Dairy CAFO is approved by the very same DNR under question.  If you are not actively alarmed over this possibility, you ought to be. Don't be one of 'those people' saying afterwards, 'why didn't someone do something?'

See this report for the crisis ignored, and abetted by Scott Walker and his band of polluters: A Report by Socially Responsible Agricultural Project in Partnership with Family Farm Defenders and Kewaunee Citizens Advocating Responsible Environmental Stewardship.

Writes Kimberlee Wright, J.D., Executive Director of the Midwest Environmental Advocates, Inc.:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The industrialization and corporate consolidation of dairy production has exploded nationwide over the last few decades, driving many small family dairy operations out of business. The total number of U.S. farms with dairy cows fell 88 percent between 1970 and 2006, while the number of dairy operations with more than 2,000 cows grew 104.6 percent between 2000 and 2006 (MacDonald, et al., 2007). In Wisconsin alone, the number of farms with dairy operations has fallen from 150,000 to 10,500 since 1944 (Mueller, 2014)

Kewaunee County, Water Advocates Petition EPA for Emergency Action

Clean water advocates are going
to the feds for our children
 and their children and beyond,
as citizens of Kewaunee County, Wisconsin
 risk their health by drinking water
from the faucet

Update: See also Groups ask EPA to investigate pollution causes by cattle farms (Bergquist, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
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"The people of Wisconsin can’t keep fighting our own state government to get the help and protections they need to be sure their drinking water is safe," said Kimberlee Wright, Midwest Environmental Advocates’ Executive Director. "The water pollution problem in Kewaunee County is so serious that we have to ask the federal government to do what our state government can’t or won’t."

Clean water advocates are going to the feds for our children and their children and beyond.

They are petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency for emergency action in a 38-page document detailing the dirty secret in northeast Wisconsin, central and eastern Wisconsin and spreading that may virtually destroy Wisconsin's tourism and recreation industry not to mention poisoning our waters, on the surface and below.
---
Petition for Emergency Action Pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act, 42 U.S.C. §300i, to Protect the Citizens of Kewaunee County, Wisconsin from Imminent and Substantial Endangerment to Public Health Caused By Nitrate and Bacteria Contamination of an Underground Source of Drinking Water, and Pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, 42 U.S.C. § 9604, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, 42 U.S.C. § 6973 ________
Submitted on Behalf of Petitioners Midwest Environmental Defense Center, Environmental Integrity Project, Midwest Environmental Advocates, Clean Wisconsin, Clean Water Action Council of Northeastern Wisconsin, and Kewaunee CARES

Scott Walker's Contributors' Gift: Neurotoxins, Carcinogens, MRSA, Ecoli, Listeria, Salmonella ...

It takes a long list to include all the toxins dumped into Wisconsin waters (including drinking-water aquifers) by the special interests of the concentrated agricultural feeding operations (CAFOs), the Dairy Business Association and the Frac Sand Industry (VanEgeren, Capital Times).

Under virtually no regulation (the DNR has to be ordered by judges to do their job after Scott Walker took over), and with $Millions lavished onto mostly (but not all) Republicans by these special interests, Wisconsin has become Number One in CAFOs under the politicized regulatory environment engendered by Walker, and Number One in Frac Sand operations, as communities' health in nearby regions are imperiled.

Writes VanEgeren:

"Special interests have pretty much crippled the ability of DNR staff to do their jobs," Kimberlee Wright of the Midwest Environmental Advocates said. "Sound science is being overruled … leaving citizens very much at risk." ...

It would be nice to hear Wisconsin politicians bellow repeatedly: Special interests will not trump the health and environment of Wisconsin.

But if Scott Walker is to be believed, God wants special interests to operate with the help of government: "I like to say thanks to God and the glaciers" for leaving behind the right kind of sand in Wisconsin, Walker said last year, (Ivey, Capital Times) publically calling for more frac sand production with no mention of the health consequences.

Maybe God feels that a child in Kewaunee County Wisconsin should not able wash out a cut with water drawn from the faucet, washing out a child's scrape or cut, an act that no responsible parent would do in that county where 16 CAFOs have devastated the groundwater of a former tourism destination, where CAFOs put profit over public health, Lake Michigan and children.

I asked Bob Clarke of the Friends of the Central Sands how he felt about an ad law judge ruling last week the DNR has the right and obligation to require groundwater monitoring at the New Chester Dairy LLC, Wisconsin's largest CAFO owned by Milk Source LLC, in Adams County.

Milk Source complained the ruling is "unfair" using reasoning that escapes this writer.

Bob Clarke replied: "It is unfortunate that ensuring safe drinking water would be viewed as unfair'. What is unfair is the fact that ordinary citizens must resort to the courts to force those entrusted with the protection of our health and natural resources to do their job. The neighbors didn't invite them to ruin their water. What is unfair is that we have to deal with this mess at all."

Point taken.