Jeff Ackerman
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
3911 Fish Hatchery
Madison, WI 53711
Jeff.Ackerman@wisconsin.gov

RE:  Public Comment on the Preliminary Determination for the Groundwater Remedial Strategy for Badger Army Ammunition Plant

Dear Mr. Ackerman,

For residents and farmers near Badger Army Ammunition Plant, there is the singular solution that protects our quality of life, our health, our environment, our agricultural heritage, and the value of our homes and farms – it is clean groundwater.

It is difficult to advocate for anything less when the military’s own Feasibility Study describes viable alternatives capable of fulfilling our collective responsibility and obligation to protect the State’s groundwater, rivers, wetlands, and natural springs.

The Army’s preferred choice, having the lowest cost to the military, is a public water supply system.  However we live in a rural agricultural community – we need clean groundwater to sustain crop irrigation, livestock wells, agriculture, organic farming, healthy wetland ecosystems and healthy fisheries.  We also need clean water for our homes.

While other aspects of this proposal may be debated, community members are unified and stalwart in their support for active environmental restoration, ill-content to allow contaminants to simply migrate from land to groundwater, moving under farm fields and family homes, and flowing for decades to our waterways and wetlands.

Badger Army Ammunition Plant, which long stood as a monument to our community’s past, now holds both the challenge and the promise to serve as a future testament to accountability and responsibility – a place where we chose to finish the job we started and restore the damage that has been done, to the benefit of our community and the generations that will follow.

Sincerely,

Laura Olah, Executive Director

(With enclosures.)