 This is our backyard. This is the Gold Family's dairy farm. This is my backyard. This is my business' backyard. My associates' backyard. And my backyard. This is our backyard. I'm at the McDonald Nature Preserve and this is my backyard. This is the more accurate rent. This is my backyard. This is my backyard. Every community in Wisconsin that is connected to Lake Michigan has treasured landscapes and natural features essential to our ecological, cultural, and economic health. These are places so important to living here that should they cease to exist life in the region would be fundamentally changed for our children. Fortunately, there is a network of citizens hard at work protecting the places that make this base and home. From Dorr County to the Illinois border, citizen-run land trusts and conservancies are creating parks and trails, setting aside land to safeguard water quality and preserving working farmland and forests as the region grows. In this great basin, we share a common love for the treasure that is Lake Michigan. The good fortune of living in the Great Lakes watershed comes with the increasingly complicated challenge of taking care of it. All the people in our communities, business leaders, farmers, policy makers, recreators, and landowners are invested in the vitality of our land and waters. As the demands on our natural resources expand, our land trusts are among our best community resources for protecting the places we all need and cherish, and we're lucky to have them because this is our backyard. Let me introduce myself first and then I'm going to get our day going here and get us onto what we're here to do. My name is Mike Striegel. I'm executive director of an organization called Gathering Waters Conservancy, or a statewide organization that works in Wisconsin's 50-plus land trusts. And what we do is try to make those community-based organizations, those organizations that are working locally to protect the places that make their communities special, we exist to make them stronger across the state. One of the ways we do that, one of the ways we try to make those groups stronger is through a collaboration that we call the Lake Michigan shorelands alliance. The Lake Michigan shorelands alliance is the 10 land trusts that exist here in the Lake Michigan basin, including the Glacier Lakes Conservancy here in Sheboygan, that are working to protect the places that make this basin special. And as you saw on the video there, and as you all know, there are plenty of places that make this place special, and they recognize it across the world. The passage of the Great Lakes Compact just recently reminds us of that. So this Lake Michigan shorelands alliance has come together to set priorities and to work together to find ways to protect the places that make this basin special in the future. And what we're hoping to do today, at the goal of today's Great Lake Gathering, which is sponsored by Gathering Waters Conservancy and the Lake Michigan shorelands alliance, is we're trying to bring together the people who can help these land trusts and are interested in working with these land trusts to achieve those goals, those priorities that have been set. And again, continue that conversation of what is important and how do we best protect these things that are special. So thank you for being a part of that. Today we'll have some speakers who can set the tone and give us some context for how this fits in nationally and globally, why it's important economically, ecologically and socially that we work on these things. And I think one exciting part is we'll have a panel of people who are doing things here locally, some of the special things that are happening here that you can get involved in. And then we want you to walk away with, and you already have the folders in front of you, ways that you can connect personally that you will be interested in connecting with these efforts personally. Before I launch this into the program, though, I have some thank yous and some introductions to do. I want to recognize some of the special people we've had join us here today, some of the people that we've tried to engage in this conversation that can help us achieve some of these goals. And they're all of you certainly, but we have especially worked hard to have our elected officials represented today. We have some of them with us today. Hello. Jim Baumgart, who helped us on our advisory council on the Sheboygan County Board with us here today. Suzanne Brault Pago from Senator Feingold's office is here with us today. Marlene Mielke from Senator Cole's office is with us today as well. State Senator Joe Liebham was with us today. And Adam Payne, the county administrator here in Sheboygan. Thank you for being here, Adam. And thank you all of you again. All of you are important to this conversation, but we're very grateful to have our elected officials who do so many things to make the work that we do possible. I also want to thank another group that has made this work possible. And they're in your program. It's our sponsors for today. And if you could just take a look on the inside cover there. But I do want to recognize them especially. The Argosy Foundation, the Brico Fund, the Joyce Foundation, the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, and the Sheboygan River Basin Partnership. All these were essential to making this happen. And I should have said at the beginning, but let me say now that we're doing four Great Lake gatherings. I see some faces who've been at our first one, which was in Green Bay. This is the second, next Wednesday. So October 8th will be in Mekwan. And then on October 15th will be in Milwaukee. So four of these gatherings to bring together people from across the basin to talk about priorities and talk about ways to get involved. So thank you for being a part of that conversation. And I hope you'll continue with this. You'll see ways to get in touch in your folder, but also obviously on the web at GreatLakeGatherings.org. So stay with this. I mean, this is a conversation that has been going on a long time before this and will have to go on a long time after this. And you've been connected. Hopefully you can get more connected today. But now let us get started with our day's events. I have the honor right now of introducing our keynote speaker. And before I give you some of his credentials, I want to tell just a brief story. He's from Green Bay and we'd heard about him and his work. And as I said, one of the goals of these Great Lake gatherings and the work that we've been doing for more than a year to plan these and get these started was to connect people who cared about their communities, cared about the Great Lakes, the communities in the Great Lakes base in Wisconsin to connect them to the land trusts, connect them to the people who are actively working to protect the things that make these places special. And we'd heard a little bit about him and he seemed like a natural fit for what we wanted to do. So I drove up to Green Bay to visit with him and it was one of the happiest moments of my work on this effort. As I talked about what we were doing and his eyes absolutely lit up and he just about burst out of his seat to say, why didn't I know more about this? Why didn't I know more about what land trusts were doing? And I said, well, you do now and now you have a way to get connected. And I knew at that moment that we'd made that connection in a way and we've all experienced that in our life but that tipping point for me to say, hey, this is exactly why we're doing this and this shows me why this can work. So I hope Paul doesn't mind but you've been kind of my poster child as I've talked about the goals of this work and hopefully as he talks to you this morning you can kind of see where he's coming from and why that is so important to us as we try to make this work go forward. But forgive me for reading a little bit but I want to get it right and give you a little bit of a sense of where Paul comes from. Paul Linsmeyer is the co-founder and general partner of Innovation for Sustainable Operations Incorporated based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He has extensive experience in sustainable business and understands the trends, growth and guidance needed for businesses to adopt green business practices. So again, one of the things that attracted us is here's somebody who has grown up and come through the business community but like so many of our business leaders in economic development, people interested in economic development they see the need for organizations like Land Trust that's all part of making a community grow in the economic development of a community. Recently Paul was appointed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to represent the United States at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Policy Meetings in Paris. He was chosen because of his expertise in triple bottom line, that's economic, social and ecological strategies and his role in developing regional economies. He also serves as the sustainability chair of New North, the economic development authority for this region and the industry chair of the Wisconsin Global Warming Task Force and the Bay Area Workforce Development Network. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Paul Linsmeyer. Thank you. I was really taken aback when I first heard about the Land Trust because as one of the founders of the New North and those of you who know the New North know it's about really creating a shared vision for a sustainable future. One of my purposes was to bring together all the various people that would be part of helping develop and create a sustainable future for our 18-Cone Initiative and Land Trust is such an important piece because I lived in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Denver in the last 40 years and running businesses there and I was drawn back to Wisconsin twice, once in 1977 from San Francisco and by the way I had an opportunity to buy a house for $75,000, four bedroom homes for the pool. I thought they were crazy. I bought a house for $18,000. That house I bought for $18,000 might be worth about $50,000 or $60,000. The other house is probably worth about $2,000,000. But anyway, and I moved back from the mountains outside of Denver and one of the things I moved back for were memories and possibilities. I've always been really impressed with the political history of Wisconsin. I think we've been always a progressive state, sometimes too humble, but we always were thinking ahead and as I look at some of the ideas that are still going on in the New North and the state of Wisconsin, we have a lot of progressive, very entrepreneurial ideas. We have a very strong manufacturing base. We just really need to rethink how we do things. So I came back here because I remembered one time when I was a child I drove my bicycle with my brothers and my buddies out to Barrett's Creek and I can't remember how far Barrett's Creek was from where I lived near St. Vincent's Hospital but it seemed a long way on that old Schwinn that I'd painted red flames on and we would spend the day out there just wandering around, climbing hills and trees and doing all that kind of stuff and those are cool memories. My children were starting to get grown but I wanted them to experience some of that and I wanted my grandchildren to experience some of those things and even I wanted them to experience the fact that I brought home two little baby raccoons and I forgot to tell my mom that I was down in the basement and one got up and got in the refrigerator when she opened it up and jumped out and that was the end of the raccoons. I had to bring it back. And I think we all have memories about the night we spent camping and laying out looking up at the stars but also we have memories of other things about what land trust can develop but let me talk a little bit about the concepts of sustainability and why land trust by themselves are not a silver bullet. Just as business by itself is not a silver bullet, community is not a silver bullet, they all have to have to have an integration. Sustainability is system thinking on steroids. That's really what it means. It's understanding the interrelationship of all the systems that we deal with. Now, I was also an altar boy for the side altar masses at St. Wilbur's Parish in Green Bay, Wisconsin for Vincent Barty. He had a separate service every day and so I feel I can say this. When Vincent Barty said something to the fact that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, well, if you take that out of context, that's really wrong and let me tell you why. Companies can win but employees and communities can lose. Just take New Page, for example. We have to look at, as organizations, what are we doing not just for the betterment of a company but what are we doing for the betterment of society in general and what are we doing for the betterment of the environment? Let's take a look at this mess we're in with the financial situation and I don't prove to be an expert at all but look at all the winners for so long. People who bought homes who really shouldn't have been able to afford it. One, short term. People who got incentives to give mortgages to people who couldn't afford it. One. Banks, one. People were winning constantly but because they were winning in a vacuum the system basically imploded. So we have to remember that we are a system. We as a community are a system and we have to understand and that's why when I talk about sustainability I'm talking about the interrelationship of people, planet and profits. The interrelationship of the economy that we have, the environment that we want to protect and enhance, and the whole issue about people. Let's just take one more example just so we can really hone this home because we are all responsible for where we are. How many people are shareholders in a company and want to get a very healthy return for their investment? We all would. But if by doing that we're making the leaders of those companies get more and more myopic and look more and more quarter to quarter instead of looking at not just the prosperity of the company but also the prosperity of the communities in which they serve and their customer base and the whole nine yards then we're really doing them a disservice. So we have to understand as individuals we have many things that we can point to ourselves as being part of the problem and that's why looking at Land Trust is so exciting. I think it's really part of the solution. I think one of the things that is really exciting about gathering waters and the people that are around it and a lot of the people in this room that we got a chance to meet earlier is that you are the ones that are filling a void of leadership in this country today. You are going out and saying I can do something I can make a change and I can do it by getting involved in boards by running for office and actually helping create a sustainability committee that maybe wouldn't have happened if your leadership wasn't there Mayor and making those things happen. We have such a dearth of leadership in this country around issues of sustainability and I think that is really troubling. I am on an international committee I just got back from New York last week representing the United States, I was in Paris in April to show the international community that there is business leadership coming to the table who understands the principles of the triple bottom line and really wants to make those things happen and again that is why I think it is so exciting to hear about Land Trust because Land Trust are part of a picture of a community and a state a community, a region and a state. Think about this why do companies come to a community and why do companies stay in a community? They don't stay because they get tax cuts and financial incentives and the like that may be part of it but they really stay because the talent is there the people with the skills are there what keeps people with talent in communities in regions and in states is because it has the type of diversity of entertainment, of art of community spirit, of community culture that is what makes people want to be there so I think we got to really start looking as we are trying to develop our economic plans as a sub-sector, the city of Sheboygan or as a bigger sub-sector if we call this whole freshwater coast having some sort of brand or metric or if we start talking about a collaboration with all the great lake states and how do we create that as a brand of a place that we want to be that is what we really need to have to become effective and what I am sending to the international community is that we have companies and we have communities in this country who understand the value of putting people, planet and profits first and understand that you can't optimize any one of those three triple bottom line theories without sub-optimizing the other ones you have to have it at an equal level and so you need to have programs to make that happen I think as we look at some of the things that really draw talent here it is things such as roads, buildings public service, public transportation healthcare, education but it is also things like what is our view of public art and how does art and architecture make a statement for our community I know the city of Sheboygan has done just a remarkable job with this short front I think this art museum in which we stand today is just such a fine example of positive things that we can do as a community and Green Bay was at a meeting yesterday where we were looking at how can we get art integrated in with all the other fine things that we have as a city and help overcome some of the challenges that we have so while land trusts are really important as a piece of getting as a real positive for ourselves it has to be in with a whole complete strategy around triple bottom line thinking so let's just talk a little bit about the triple bottom line so you really understand what I mean and why it is so important to understand it the people piece refers to social equity it refers to having a sense of fair play it refers to having a sense of wellness a sense of safety a sense of health for everybody involved in the community or in companies it refers to something that I call lifelong learning a cradle to grave learning we're in a very serious situation in this state right now I used to be the chair Senator Lieben and I were on the Council on Workforce Investment together and I was the chair of that organization and I think some of the challenges we see in this state around people who don't have skills people my age who don't have skills to do the jobs that they're at and companies and organizations and even the federal system of training isn't necessarily robust enough to be able to get us what we need to have and even the interesting thing I was at breakfast today with a young woman who was talking about the fact that we have people wanting solar installed on their homes but they can't get any solar installed because there's no installers in the Milwaukee area well that's a real big disconnect with getting things done and I think that's a real problem a second piece is a whole piece of under people is a whole piece about creative energy if we would think about the biggest challenge for this state and this country as we compete in a global economy is around creativity and innovation creativity and innovation would make us different if we look at the 100 some thousand engineers that are graduating in India and China every year and what do we look at the difference between those engineers and ourselves those engineers didn't have the traditional liberal arts education that we had so that gives us our innovation that gives us our can do spirit but what are we doing we're starting to cut that out of our programs that's a serious problem and I think we've really got to look at that because innovation and creativity are the difference let's look a little bit at the happiness factor and I think this is where land trust fit in immensely the American population in the last 30 years has been seen a market decrease in happiness while they've improved in income not so much in the last few years but in income and in getting stuff but they're basically unhappy you know I think one of the things that land trust can help us do is can help us refocus on what's important in life and what's important is having a sort of a almost spiritual relationship with the land and I think we really need to get back to that happiness factor means that we really got to start parking our cars outside of our attached garages and tearing down our fences and putting up front porches so we can start talking to people happiness means that we cannot only have relationships at work which is the study show is very true because people are so busy running their kids and doing other things they don't have solid relationships except at work so we really need to start tearing down the barriers and then I think the last issue under the people thing that really needs to be addressed is the intergenerational crisis that we have right now and I think people really don't understand it at all you know people are concerned about baby boomers many of us are close to our retirement age and the crisis that these people are going to go outside the market and we won't have people to replace them and I suggest that maybe not be true because many of us I'm not that far from retirement age and I don't plan to retire so I have retired from traditional work I'm now doing what I want to do but I want to do my whole life and so how can we take other people like myself and maybe introduce them into the workforce in different ways to do that we need educational institutions and companies working together to get these people re-engaged and non-traditional roles within companies that's sustainability that's the people part of sustainability but the real crisis is in the fact that the older generation thinks the younger generation doesn't have a work ethic and I think that's absolute nonsense they just don't have our work ethic and maybe we ought to reassess arts you know when many of us put the priorities for work ahead of family and ahead of enjoyment and ahead of happiness I think that creates a real problem and so for us to have a judgment against this other generation if we don't think we have this in companies I've been all over the country and all over the world talking to companies and going inside the balls of companies this is loud and clear and the intergenerational issue is huge and it's being ignored so I think we really need to get to the bottom of that as far as the second piece of the triple bottom line we obviously need clean air and water and I think as chair of the industry council of the Wisconsin Global Warming Initiative I really got an education on first of all what are the problems, what are the issues but what are the barriers to collaboration and I think part of the problem is many of us are successful in our own right we do things really well but we have no idea of what we do how it affects the system how it affects other parts of the system, how it affects how do I as a business person affect society well I give donations to charity well no that's not good enough that's not what it's about it's about how do I as a business get involved in the community either by helping get some of my employees on boards or on committees or actually working targeting a specific charity and really going all out to try to fix a problem like the fact that we have a tremendous who don't have support systems from birth to five years old that's a serious problem many of those people are going to be many of those children are going to be problems for the state in the future so as organizations and people we have to reach out and do more we have to understand how all the systems connect and that's one of the reasons that the new north itself is a picture of sustainability because we have every single stakeholder except Land Trust and now we got them at the table talking about problems together bringing their various lenses and fixing things so that's a really important point we need to have places to recreate and relax and I think that's one thing that Land Trust can help us with because I think one of the things that's really lacking is people reconnecting with nature my company we wrote our employee handbook that is probably really unusual because it doesn't have a lot of prescriptive things but it does have one thing that four days a year we're going to spend a day in very intimate community with nature that we're going to do something really special so that we never forget our true relationship with nature and I think that's really important I really talked about the whole planet thing that in the environment piece is you have to be concerned not only about the health of the water and air and all that but you have to be concerned about the actual environment looking at Richard Florida's Creativity Index which Wisconsin scored relatively low especially the Green Bay Area but since then I think we've done a lot of good things how do we actually look at what makes people want to be part of our community and how do we look at things that makes people really want to be that our community really appears to be vibrant because not only appears to be because it is and I think that those are things that are really important under the profits things I think we really have to look at strong economies which as I talked about earlier are built on talent at people we have to look at diversity we have to look at immigration we have to have real talks about those things we can't leave it to politicians we have to talk about it we have to understand it and then we need to start talking about things like as business leaders and as community leaders about living within our means about over consumption we really need to have real dialogue on those things I think we're just going to continue on this downward spiral and then the last thing is we really need to have 21st century accounting principles we are using 19th and early 20th century accounting principles to drive us in the economy which is driven on 21st century global principles and when I talk about that what I mean is we need to look at indicators rather than lagging indicators and I talk to my companies about that all the time because if you're looking at leading indicators some of the stuff that's happening today is not going to come as a surprise for example they've been talking about there have been reporters talking about this the home bubble for at least six years so if somebody said this came up on us you've not been watching so I own a lot of property and I made some real wise decisions and now I look back at it a couple years ago and I basically divested and got into some other things as companies and as communities and as organizations not for profits are we really looking at leading indicators that could really have a substantial effect on us look at the whole NGO field not for profits it's going to be tough to get money now it's just going to be a challenge for a long time but it's going to be a bigger challenge how are you going to survive have you thought about a contingency plan that's sustainability that's what that's about it also means that when you're looking at capital projects and I'm working with a lot of institutions that are doing major major $200, $300 million projects and besides looking at their capital costs and one of the things they're trying to do as they propose to their boards and their funding institutions is how can they get the return on investment to satisfy their boards and their investors well if you start looking at projects in a different way you look at the capital cost of the project but then you look at the operating cost of the system by going to a lead or green-styled system if you combine those two together you're going to have a better a much better story to tell and it really is all about the story you tell whether you can convince somebody to engage in that project or not but the problem is in the traditional accounting mechanisms they want to use today's dollars everything in today's dollars but we know tomorrow's dollars aren't going to be the same as today's dollars just look at trends and so we need to have accounting principles that look at these things differently so we we need just a couple other things to think about as we're going forward in the new north and in Wisconsin as a whole when you start thinking about sustainability and again why I don't want to talk solely about land trust as being the panacea we need to consider things like alternative transportation you know and this is really important this is where you can never look at people plan and profit separately together because what affects our people driving to and from work the cost of fuel not only affects their pocketbooks it affects the money that they're going to spend on other things but it affects the fact that you can't give them a pay raise that is going to equal the amount that they're going to have an increased cost to drive to and from work so what are alternatives so we can start taking the burden off these individuals and that means we have to have better mass transportation thinking about high speed rail you know it's been proposed you know nationally that it would really make a lot of sense as a transportation solution for the United States that you really don't need an Amtrak running across the country what you really need is high speed regional rail running from let's say Green Bay to Chicago or Milwaukee and then you need a real good airline to carry your service from the major hubs so that the high speed rail will really get you a lot of real positive things so that again is sustainability in action and again I'm not proposing any one of these solutions outside of the context of all the other solutions so we have to look at this as a big picture let's just look at one final thing and this is the Great Lakes as a region the Great Lakes as a region all the power in the world we can be the third largest economic engine in the country but we can only do it if we collaborate but one of the challenges I'm bringing in a speaker for the New North called Richard Longworth he wrote a book called Caught in the Middle and what he says in that book and I agree with him 100% is our biggest problem is we have not recognized the value in collaboration we have not recognized the value if we started crossing county lines we start crossing municipal lines but we haven't recognized the value in the true value of collaboration yet so we haven't even thought about reaching out to other states in this Great Lakes region and really look at the opportunities we have think about this a possibility if we would take these states are all high manufacturing states why don't we leverage that manufacturing expertise and combine it with we have some of the best educational institutions in the world in these Great Lakes states why don't we start collaborating and start incubating new business and new ideas around water technology around green technology and start creating jobs in business incubating these ideas through collaboration we just aren't there that's not our thought process and I think that is really where we need to go if we start reaching across to other states and this is a political thing but it's also us we're part of the political process if we can actually help our legislators and our governor understand the value of collaboration we can make this stuff happen but we can't if we just sit back and wait we had a man die who I was I liked him as an actor I thought he was pretty amusing and did a pretty good job but I think he was probably one of the finest men I knew and I first met him I didn't meet him personally when I was a freshman at Marquette in 1969 and they would have free movie day or whatever he and Joanne Woodward were in this movie and it was something about a race car he was going to take his newly wedded wife to Milwaukee for honeymoon that's the only part I can remember the whole movie but I thought it was so funny why would you do that but this man really is it was very emotional when he died because he did what I would want to do he did what I am doing he he gave a lot of money to things that he believed in he said something you know so often it's not only about winning it's not about the moral and ethical thing to do I mean God does that say a lot and he wasn't talking about any one particular administration he was addressing the administrations in general and he actually went into a lot of detail but this man really created a sense of hey you can make a difference you know he was a pretty big name so he made it in a big way but we can all make a difference in our own way and I think a lot of you are already doing that but how do we get others to do that that's our challenge so my main message to you and I'll take some questions if there's some time is let's look at Land Trust as a way but not the only way to really drive sustainability in our communities and our organizations it's really going to be though through a successful equal collaboration according to Peter Drucker a business, government and NGOs that is going to drive system change and I think that that is happening it's started but we have a long way to go and I think the best thing that we can do since we do have a dearth of leadership in this country around issues like this is we can do it at a local and a regional level and possibly even at a state level if we can get through some of the political wranglings we have there and really start driving the change here until we can get the leadership in our country that's going to see that we again need to have that can do spirit that we can be the change the world needs thank you Hi I'm John Gumpto I'm a member of the Sheboygan River Basin Partnership we're here on Willow Creek today this is one of our projects we've been working on for a number of years and we're right outside the city of Sheboygan and the Willow Creek is important and it's a really unique resource in that we have a cold water resource a cold water trout stream right next to an urbanized setting in an area that's proposed to be have more urbanization in an area that will have future urbanization and through our work back in the early 2000s there was some documentation of cold water fish species coho, salmon brook trout, brown trout in this creek and that wasn't known before since we've gotten involved we've done some more surveys and found out that we've got not only coho and schnook salmon which are great lake fish species we've also got brook trout and brown trout which are native to these types of smaller streams in addition we've got steelhead trout that are also another lake Michigan fish now these big lake fish come up into these small streams in the spring and in the fall to spawn so these resources are really unique to them and really vital to reproduction, the reproduction cycle of the great lakes fishery we've done surveys up here and we found the fry which are the small new yearlings from last year and we found the they're about 3-4 inches long the coho and the schnook and the salmon we're doing the surveys the Sheboyin River Basin Partnership is doing these aquatic surveys to grant money from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources they've also, these agencies have also provided us some technical assistance people and equipment to help us do these surveys so through these surveys we've been finding these small fish and the larger fish and the uniqueness of this resources this is the only place in Wisconsin that's been documented that steelhead, coho and schnook salmon are naturally reproducing they're put and take fish species that are mostly for tourism and for great lakes sports fishery to have them naturally producing in these types of habitats is really unique and rare in Wisconsin this is the only place outside Sheboyin, Wisconsin where this is actually happening the reason that fish find this area attractive and find it suitable for their reproduction is one is, as you can see it's a very clean water water body there's very little sediment in this tributary the other thing it's got the right cobble, mix of cobble and sand in the substrate which is the bottom of the creek and the third important part is, it's a cold water resource which means it's getting its water supply from underground so ground water is discharging into the stream at these locations and that cold water is what the fish eggs need to survive why do so many other rivers not produce? sure, there are other streams like this up and down the lake shore on the west shore of Lake Michigan they may have good water quality they may lack the ground water discharge or the cold water influence this particular stream has all those components that makes the reproduction successful so you need the mix of the cold water which is kind of substrate and in this case you can also see the shading effect which helps keep the cold water cool you can hear in the background I said before we're right next to the city of Sheboygan we're also right next to I-43 so you can hear the traffic in the background and so that in my mind that makes this really unique you've got urbanization you've got a major highway corridor where thousands of people travel up and down this corridor every day drive right over this creek and do not know what's going on so as part of our organization what we're trying to do is get public awareness make the public aware of what this resource is and get the public to understand and get the public enthused about protecting this resource that's our next challenge we've done a lot of study on this creek a lot of study has been done we can do more study to do some protection and protection comes in the form of working with municipalities working with the adjacent landowners to do things such as establishing buffers where maybe you have a 50 or 100 foot buffer along this creek where there can be no development or providing more shade cover planting some trees next to the river to provide some shade cover which again will help cool the river down so that who's going to do this work the work is going to get done in a lot of different ways it's not going to happen by a state agency alone it's not going to happen by a local unit of government it's going to happen through cooperation over all those entities and the money is not going to only come from one place either because this watershed is the Willow Creek watershed is separated by five different municipalities we've got Village of Kohler, Town of Sheboygan Town of Sheboygan Falls City of Sheboygan and Town of Sheboygan and all these municipalities have their political boundaries through this creek so we need all these groups to pull together and understand what the resource is why it's important to protect and what we can do to enhance it I really feel that a stream like this running through a piece of property or running through a municipality that can be enhanced and enjoyed by a number of people and not just considered a waterway to convey water we just walked and coming down to this spot we just walked on a trail a lot of people use this trail my vision of this area would be there would be a trail that connects along Willow Creek that connects City of Sheboygan Falls to the City of Sheboygan and people can look at this stream and enjoy it I noticed some of the signage there's been a little park trail where some of the signage needs to be worked on we've got a number of different initiatives going on right now for this Willow Creek we're working with municipalities to develop a storm water management plan we recently did a brochure that we can hand out to the public so they can understand the history and the uniqueness of this resource we've also entered into a recent project where we've got signs we've developed very durable signs that can weather the weather conditions and weather the elements that will help explain to people what's happening here along Willow Creek and it will be there for many years to come some of our partners on the sign program are University of Wisconsin Extension Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Sheboygan County we're looking to get funds from Wisconsin Public Service Corporation again this is a multi discipline effort trying to get a lot of partners together to fund the some of the initiatives we have and to get the word out to the public one of the goals of our project here along Willow Creek is to stabilize areas like this right here along this trail we've got some bank erosion and one of the projects we have coming up is to do some activities to stabilize this bank so it doesn't continue to wash when it washes some of the fine soil material washes into the stream that's not a big deal in a small section like this but when we go further upstream and downstream there's some other areas where this bank erosion causes a lot of sedimentation enter into the waterway and that sediment can cover the fish eggs during critical times of egg incubation can you correct this or need the bank? what we'll do is we'll come up with some very simple techniques to stabilize this bank it may include putting a series of rocks along here to hold to keep the water away from the soil we could put some fish structures here some bank cover structures to keep the soil back and also allow some to keep the soil back but also to allow some plant material to grow behind it the bank erosion and the stabilization we're going to be doing along Willow Creek will happen wherever it's needed as a river moves down there's different cutting and depositing that goes along along the banks and this area just happens to be an area where there's some severe cutting this is pretty there's pretty very few areas like this the history of Willow Creek Willow Creek starts up in near Sheboygan Falls near the intersection of Highway 23 and 32 in that segment of the channel there's a lot of agriculture land use around the channel the channel's been straightened it's been dredged and it's been culverted and re-routed so one of the challenges we have at river along Willow Creek is to reverse some of those man-made influences that have happened over the years but as as the creek moves to the east and flows closer to the city of Sheboygan the geology changes and when the geology changes we start picking up some of these larger cobbles that show up in the river and the river also starts to pick up a gradient