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Is Your Community Planning to Protect Its Drinking Water?

By Lynn Markham, Land Use Specialist

For most of us in Wisconsin, the water we drink comes from right below our feet.  In fact, 97% of communities rely on groundwater as their drinking water source.  Groundwater is Wisconsin's invisible resource - our buried treasure.  Protecting groundwater from contamination and overuse is vital to the health of Wisconsin's people, ecosystems, communities, and economy.

The Challenge

Many Wisconsin communities are facing groundwater stress in various forms and can benefit or have benefited from groundwater planning. For example:

  • Chemical contamination of a municipal well in the City of Waupaca by a dry cleaning business led the city council and local businesses to adopt multiple water conservation measures after being faced with reduced pumping capacity.

  • High nitrate levels in a municipal well in the City of Chippewa Falls led the county board to adopt a county-wide wellhead protection ordinance.

  • Private well testing and drinking water education programs in Iowa County led to greater awareness, installation of household water filters, greater use of the county's well abandonment program and participation in a comprehensive groundwater study to guide local land use planning.

  • Rapid population growth in Washington County led the Town of Richfield to develop a water budget for the town and then adopt a groundwater protection ordinance that regulates water use in new developments.

While a large amount of information and data exist, many Wisconsin communities may not have the resources or expertise to locate, evaluate, and incorporate appropriate groundwater information and data in their plans.  In many instances, it may be difficult for a community to know where to begin.

New Groundwater Planning Website

To address this problem, CLUE and the USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center created a website called Protecting Wisconsin's Groundwater Through Comprehensive Planning.  The website incorporates data from 16 federal, state and local agencies, and is intended to make Wisconsin groundwater information and data accessible and usable.  The website makes it easier for government officials and planners to incorporate groundwater into their comprehensive planning processes.  Communities that have already adopted their comprehensive plans will have an opportunity to incorporate additional groundwater data from this website during plan revisions.

This web site is organized into four sections: Learn, Integrate, Find and Browse.

Learn

The Learn section is designed to help you learn more about how groundwater is used in Wisconsin and what scientific researchers have found regarding how groundwater moves and how it can be contaminated.  This section also provides links to a number of fact sheets about planning for groundwater, a recent report about many groundwater issues in Wisconsin, and a few key reports about the connections between land, groundwater, and lakes and streams.

Integrate

The Integrate section is designed to help you integrate groundwater into your comprehensive plan.  This section includes groundwater-specific recommendations for five steps of the planning process:

Step 1: Review pre-planning actions
Step 2: Inventory groundwater data and analyze trends
Step 3: Develop groundwater goals, objectives and policies
Step 4: Prioritize policies
Step 5: Decide how to monitor progress

Find

The Find section provides an executive summary and full report about groundwater in each of Wisconsin's 72 counties including:

  • Sources of drinking water

  • Groundwater protection policies

  • Money spent on cleanup

  • Groundwater use

  • Susceptibility of groundwater to pollutants

  • Groundwater quality

  • Potential sources of contaminants

Browse

The Browse section contains:

  • References for the footnotes in the text

  • Links to web resources for data and information

  • Links to groundwater programs at state and federal agencies

  • Links to assist in locating groundwater and planning expertise.

References

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. (2005). Resources To Help You Protect Your Drinking Water Supply: Comprehensive Planning and Groundwater Fact Sheet 2. Wisconsin Groundwater Coordinating Council. 4 pp.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, (2006). Groundwater: Wisconsin's Buried Treasure.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for funding this project through the Wisconsin Groundwater Coordinating Council.  We also thank the U.S. Geological Survey for additional financial support.  We are grateful to the project advisory committee for their constructive advice and encouragement.