The policy board which oversees the Wisconsin DNR has approved a first step which could eventually strengthen rules that prevent harmful contaminants from running off farms into rural wells.
The vote to set up the scope of the process was 5-1. The bad news is that the chairman of the DNR policy board chairman is a Walker appointee who put the lone dissenter who is also a Walker appointee in charge of that scoping process:
In other words, Walkerites continue to have an outsized role a year after they lost the election, as I've noted before.
More bad news: the Legislature which would eventually receive any new rules is likely to remain controlled by gerrymandered Republicans, and they are beholden to many of the same special corporate interests which already oppose stronger runoff rules.
In other words, the deck is stacked against substantive solutions to a known and persistent public health hazard.
Note also that the GOP-run State Senate recently took the rare step of firing Gov. Evers Ag department Secretary after he tried unsuccessfully to begin a different rule-making process also designed to reduce the release of pollutants from some ag operations.
The groundwater crisis in rural Wisconsin has been a frequent topic on this blog:
As Kewaunee County clean water activist Nancy Utesch explained nearly a year ago, people have waited long enough for relief.
The vote to set up the scope of the process was 5-1. The bad news is that the chairman of the DNR policy board chairman is a Walker appointee who put the lone dissenter who is also a Walker appointee in charge of that scoping process:
[Dentist and cranberry grower Frederick] Prehn appointed board member Bill Bruins, a dairy farmer and the lone member to oppose approval of the scope statement, to oversee the process for the board.(A DNR link to the policy board members and their terms is here.)
In other words, Walkerites continue to have an outsized role a year after they lost the election, as I've noted before.
More bad news: the Legislature which would eventually receive any new rules is likely to remain controlled by gerrymandered Republicans, and they are beholden to many of the same special corporate interests which already oppose stronger runoff rules.
In other words, the deck is stacked against substantive solutions to a known and persistent public health hazard.
Note also that the GOP-run State Senate recently took the rare step of firing Gov. Evers Ag department Secretary after he tried unsuccessfully to begin a different rule-making process also designed to reduce the release of pollutants from some ag operations.
The groundwater crisis in rural Wisconsin has been a frequent topic on this blog:
There is a surplus of documentation about Wisconsin's rural well water nitrate contamination crisis - - examples, here and here - - and ad infinitum back to at least 2015:
Nitrate in water widespread, current rules no match for it
In fact, The New York Times came to rural Wisconsin and posted this story a year ago come this Sunday:
Rural America's Own Private Flint; Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink
ARMENIA, Wis. — The groundwater that once ran cool and clean from taps in this Midwestern farming town is now laced with contaminants and fear. People refuse to drink it. They won’t brush their teeth with it. They dread taking showers.
Rural communities call it their own, private Flint — a diffuse, creeping water crisis tied to industrial farms and slack regulations that for years has tainted thousands of residential wells across the Midwest and beyond.---------------------------------------------------
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| Kewaunee County has seen numerous manure discharges from large animal feeding operations concentrated there. |
Data show what people in Kewaunee County and the Central Sands region who live near the industrial-scale Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, already know:
Their drinking water is contaminated.Bottom line: without a change in the make-up of the Legislature, substantive relief is still years away.