Public welcome at the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council’s final fall watershed planning session

Photo Credit: Community members young and old took a break from the fall festivities at Tucker and Becky’s Pumpkin Patch to share their hopes for the future of the Coon Creek Watershed as part of our fall watershed planning series. The last event in the line-up is 1:30-2:30 Nov. 6, at Knutson Memorial Library.

Public welcome at the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council’s Final Fall Watershed Planning Session

COON VALLEY, Wis.- Coon Creek Watershed residents will have another opportunity to shape a plan for the Coon Creek Watershed this November, in the last of four public planning meetings we’ve hosted this fall. The planning meeting will be held from 1:30-2:30 Nov. 6, at Coon Valley’s Knutson Memorial Library.

The watershed plan, which follows the Nine Element framework outlined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is meant to identify and address community concerns regarding the care and management of Coon Creek and its tributaries. The plan is a collaboration between us, partners in La Crosse, Monroe, and Vernon Counties, Valley Stewardship Network, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WI-DNR) and Coon Creek Watershed residents.

“This plan belongs to everyone who lives in or cares about the Coon Creek Watershed,” said CCCWC president Nancy Wedwick. “We are doing this work to build resilience to accelerating flooding, to create economic opportunity, to improve community health, and to care for Coon Creek’s lands and waters as best we can.”

The plan is being completed in two parts. The first part, which covers the Timber Coulee Subbasin, is on schedule to move into its implementation phase this June. The second part of the plan encompasses the rest of the Coon Creek Watershed, and will be completed over the next three years with support from a WI-DNR Surface Water Grant.

November’s event caps off a busy fall for us. We’ve hosted three additional watershed planning events in locations across the watershed, including an earlier event at the library to introduce the planning process and spark community conversation, plan outreach and youth engagement at Tucker and Becky’s Pumpkin Patch, and a screening of Decoding the Driftless followed by a planning discussion at Branches Winery.

The final meeting in this series will cover themes that emerged during community conversations at past events, and detail the next steps of the watershed planning process.

Some of these themes include widespread community interest in reducing flooding through land conservation best management practices, concerns about public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and culverts in the face of worsening flooding, and hopes for improved manure management practices. The conversations also touched on the need for improved watershed literacy and conservation education, water quality sampling that reflects a broad range of conditions in the Coon Creek Watershed, and stronger support for landholders implementing conservation best practices.

We hope the November 6th meeting will inspire further discussion about priorities for the Coon Creek Watershed Plan, and next steps in the planning process. One of these next steps will be using mapping tools like the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework to identify opportunities for conservation practice implementation in the Coon Creek Watershed.

Material from past planning sessions is available on our planning webpage, https://cooncreekwatershed.org/nine-key-element-plan/. If you still want to contribute to the plan, please get in touch with us by emailing council@cooncreekwatershed.org, or attend our monthly council meetings.

Our next meeting will be Nov. 6th at the Coon Valley Conservation Club. Dinner will begin at 6;00, followed by watershed updates and a recap of the fall watershed planning sessions at 6:30. The meeting is free and all are welcome.

The mission of the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council is to continue the historic legacy of conservation leadership through improving and restoring our soil, water, and air as stewards of the Creek Watershed. We focus on strategies and practices that individuals can implement. Together, we are learning to make running water walk.

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