Gretchen Benjamin
Kelvin Rodolfo
Amber Meyer Smith
Water issues facing Wisconsin will be topic of a Vernon County Democratic Party roundtable Monday, Oct. 10.
Entertainment for the event will be provided by the Raging Grannies of Madison, who sing about topics including water, tax dollars, health care and conservation.
“Wisconsin is facing some critical water issues right now,” said Amber Meyer Smith, program director at Clean Wisconsin Action Fund (CWAF) and one of three speakers at the roundtable, which will be from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the party’s headquarters in the former Hotel Fortney, 100 N. Main Street, Viroqua.
“Algae blooms clogging our beaches from excess nutrients, contaminated drinking water wells in some areas of the state due largely to polluted runoff, spreading invasive species, lakes and rivers drying up because of high capacity wells, and a dead zone in Green Bay are just some of the more egregious water quality problems,” Smith said.
The CWAF works to protect Wisconsin’s waterways, fights against rollbacks to existing laws, and holds legislators accountable for their votes, she said.
Smith leads air and water programs for CWAF and its sister organization, Clean Wisconsin, and serves as CWAF’s government liaison. Before joining CWAF, she was policy analyst for Wisconsin Sen. Bob Wirch, D-Kenosha, and legislative liaison for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Kelvin Rodolfo, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, lives in the town of Viroqua with his wife Kathy Crittenden. He will focus on stream and groundwater pollution by frac-sand mining in the Driftless.
Due to the region’s soil structure, pollution, including fertilizers and herbicides from farms, can get into the groundwater through sinkholes, caves and fissures, he said.
“In recent years, the clean, rounded sand grains of some of our aquifers have become prized for use in ‘hydro-fracturing’ of deep shale rocks containing oil and gas. The boom in mining of these ‘frac sands’ is consuming large quantities of our groundwater, and careless processing of the frac sands is introducing noxious chemicals into our aquifers.”
Rodolfo has applied his geologic, environmental and karst expertise to oppose Dairyland Power’s coal-ash dump and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Vernon County. He lectures on the area’s karst geology and has shared his knowledge with grassroots organizations in northwest Wisconsin and adjacent areas of Iowa and Minnesota.
Gretchen Benjamin, water resources infrastructure associate director for The Nature Conservancy’s North America freshwater program, will talk about the Mississippi River as receiving water for two-thirds of Wisconsin and nutrient issues associated with agriculture.
Benjamin, who lives near the Mississippi River in La Crosse, works on science and policy regarding the river with a diverse network of partners. She is a founding member of the Mississippi Valley Conservancy and was a field biologist, river planner and basin policy advisor for the Wisconsin DNR before joining the conservancy.
Alicia Leinberger, candidate for Wisconsin’s 96th Assembly seat, will speak on why clean water, air and land is one of the values she’ll champion when elected.
The roundtable is free and open to the public.
