Water Pollution Skyrockets Under @GovWalker:His own data shows addition of 804 polluted waterways.

Water Pollution Skyrockets Under Walker

His own data shows addition of 804 polluted waterways.

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2018/01/17/op-ed-water-pollution-skyrockets-under-walker/


By James Rowen - Jan 17th, 2018 02:07 pm


Gov. Walker says he’s taking Wisconsin in the right direction, but that destination may be a place where you don’t want to smell, drink or fish the public waters, his own data show.

The governor has said here and here and elsewhere that he always leaves the environment cleaner than he found it.

The data show the opposite; official auditing shows Wisconsin ignored its water pollution enforcement rules 94 percent of the time while inspections were declining as a matter of policy.

Some good news: Legislators are working to require the DNR to issues public notices of water pollution permit violations, correcting if not actually creating a public information system that would require public notifications.

And, yes, it’s hard to track and keep straight all the legislation and executive actions since early 2011 that are intentionally undermining public health and enabling contamination and filth for profit in Wisconsin – – from wetlands filling to shoreline construction to green-lit groundwater contamination from big feedlots to new toxic sulfide mining permissions to proposed rollbacks in air quality to already-implemented, freshly-tolerated, algae-breeding phosphorous discharges into state waterways that all belong to the public.

And mentally underline “phosphorous” as you focus on just two facts gathered from the links that follow:

* There has been a doubling under Walker of the number of polluted waterways in the state since his 2011 swearing-in.

* And there have been more than eight times as many waterways – – 804 – – newly added to the official polluted lists (government likes the sanitized label “impaired”), far more than the 96 waterways improved enough to be removed from the lists.........................................