The Coon Creek Community Watershed Council wants to save water
COON CREEK, Wis. (WLAX/WEUX) – A Coulee Region nonprofit is trying to make an area creek more resilient. First News at Nine's Dashal Mentzel explains how the organization's plan would both help the environment and the people who live by the creek.
The Coon Creek Community Watershed Council is a mostly volunteer-run non-profit that works to conserve water in Coon Creek. A watershed is an area of land that separates water flowing into different areas. Council Coordinator Sydney Widell says they work to create a thriving watershed and are forming a watershed plan due to concerns by the Coon Valley community, "I would say an overarching priority for a lot of the people involved in our organization is preventing and reducing chronic and accelerating flooding that has increasingly been a worry here in the Coon Creek watershed.
"This plan is something that belongs to everyone. We all have a really cool opportunity right now to shape the future of the place we live."
The Council is holding a public meeting to discuss ideas for the watershed. From community members to water conservatives across the state, many people are showing interest in the project. "We've had a few public meetings across the course of the fall and what our goal in these public meetings has been to bring people together to think about what we want the watershed to look like when we're done with this plan."
Widell says hearing from community members has been a big help in shaping what the future project will look like, "The plan we're creating belongs to everyone in the watershed and this work is made possible by the amazing insights that we're learning from our community and all the expertise that is already here is so powerful. It's just a matter of bringing people into a room to have these conversations."
In Coon Valley, Dashal Mentzel First News at Nine.
Some ideas that have been discussed include planting trees and cover crops as well as shifting toward perennial agricultural systems.
