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The Kitchens File: Environmental Disaster

On Wednesday, August 3, Lynn Utesch, Kewaunee County candidate for Wisconsin’s 1st Assembly District, traveled to Ashland, WI to testify before the Natural Resources Board on behalf of every citizen in our district, speaking to the present and persistent public health emergency regarding contaminated water in Kewaunee County.

July 28, 2016 marked the 5th anniversary of a grassroots community organization co-founded by Lynn Utesch and other citizen activists, attempting to educate the public about the dangerously deteriorating quality of our surface and ground water resources, called Kewaunee C.A.R.E.S (Citizens Advocating Responsible Environmental Stewardship). And while Mr. Utesch and many devoted citizen volunteers are continually fighting for public health and safety through environmental remediation, the obvious question emerges. Where was our elected, salaried Representative Kitchens in addressing our contaminated water emergency?

In February of 2015, Rep. Joel Kitchens told a big crowd at the Door County Library, that little could be done to get industrial dairy interests to conform to stricter pollution elimination standards and that CAFOs were here to stay, so deal with it. When asked on September 14, 2015 to consider requesting that Governor Walker declare a public health emergency regarding residential well contamination, just to get emergency clean water to an estimated 3,500 affected citizens in his district, Kitchens said he’d check into that.

February 2016 saw Mr. Kitchens voting to forward AB874 from his Assembly Committee on the Environment, granting perpetual, unregulated water extraction rights to owners of high capacity wells, and in March of 2016, Kitchens’ solution to begin addressing the polluted Ahnapee River was dependent upon citizen volunteers to do water sampling for the DNR, to pinpoint pollution sources and float two monitoring buoys, after the DNR has ignored years of exhaustive scientific study and water testing data gathered by citizen volunteers in several district watersheds.

In late June 2016 with DNR and EPA input, the Groundwater Collaboration Work Group issued a 63-page report specifying immediately needed changes to WI DNR administrative rules, to begin addressing fully acknowledged, contaminated water in Kewaunee County and emergency residential drinking water needs. As the Governor predictably and obligingly bent to Dairy Business Association lobbying in mid-July and gutted those recommendations for being too, “costly” for DBA members, where was Joel Kitchens?

“Representative” Kitchens appeared publicly in Kewaunee on July 29, essentially thanking the Governor for approving an extremely modified and marginalized Statement of Scope for administrative rules changes, potentially delaying for years, remediation of industrial dairy caused water pollution, and fully disregarding official acknowledgement of thousands of district citizens without potable water.

This week, the Sierra Club, John Muir Chapter rated Rep. Kitchens at a 13 percent approval on environmental quality issues. There are no valid excuses for this abysmal rating, a failing grade for protection of our environment, especially for any legislator appointed to our state Environmental and Forestry Committee. However, the Sierra Club today, officially endorsed candidate Lynn Utesch for Assembly, come this November 8.

 

Donald Freix
Fish Creek, Wis.

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