Letter to Citizens, 2006 Water Quality Report to Congress
Bass Lake, Wisconsin.
WDNR Photo
This 2006 Water Quality Report to Congress provides an overview of the status of Wisconsin's water resources and introduces you to the multiple initiatives underway in our state to manage and protect our resources. Recently much work has taken place to evaluate and improve the way water resources are understood and managed in Wisconsin. During the last four years, the Water Division of the Department of Natural Resources has conducted a critical evaluation of its underlying objectives, goals, and successes and set four strategic objectives related to the long-term protection and management of water. These objectives are not stand-alone words on paper -- they provide the framework for how the water program is organized and what the goals and performance measures for water-related resource integrity are for the Department and its many valued partners and customers. The overriding objectives for how Wisconsin's water resources are managed include:
This report responds to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency's guidelines for a report documenting the state of our state's water resources, but the information presented ties back to and is closely organized around these four fundamental strategic objectives. For Wwithout clean and abundant drinking water and groundwater, it would be difficult to restore and protect our state's extraordinary fisheries (many of our fisheries rely on the cold, clean baseflow that abundant groundwater provides). And, if we don't know about the health and welfare of our fisheries and other aquatic life, it is impossible to set meaningful biologically based goals for protecting the quality of rivers and lakes and implementing the Clean Water Act. And finally, underlying all the objectives articulated above, it is a fundamental directive of the agency to protect, restore, and provide access to our state's shared water ressources through protecting the Public Trust -- ensuring that our public water resources are available in a quality state for the people of Wisconsin, and that they are protected in perpetuity.
