It was a shame to lose this piece of history when reworking the South Lake page. This page is offered to the blog for posterity!
The ‘South Lake Group’ has taken on many different forms over past years, from the Poultney Mettowee Watershed Partnership, to the South Lake Working Group, to the short-lived Friends of Southern Lake Champlain. The ongoing thread is the continued recognition that South Lake is a dynamic and beautiful part of the larger Lake Champlain watershed. The diversity and beauty spread from the Lower Poultney River, recognized as an Outstanding Resource Waterway, with its populations of rare freshwater muscles, to the beautiful waterfalls in the headwater streams.
The current South Lake Partnership includes the District, Rutland Regional Planning Commission, Vermont DEC‘s South Lake Tactical Basin Planner, a Green Mountain College professor, town administrators, local scientists, foresters, and small business owners. The goal of the group is to work together, across political boundaries, within the South Lake Watershed to promote the area as the Gateway to Lake Champlain, and as such, an important protector of water quality for the lake.
SPOTLIGHT – The South Lake Watershed Partnership is gaining momentum
Leahy Environmental Summit
The South Lake Partnership participated in the 2015 Leahy Environmental Summit, with its theme ‘Climate Change Resilient, Floodwater Smart.’ We traveled to Burlington, where we spent March 19 and 20 at the ECHO Center refining our project ideas and exploring our creative sides. While at the summit, the team focused on creating a community checklist that would provide a comprehensive measurement of flood resiliency within a town or within a watershed, depending on the scale of the study. The checklist would be used to collect information about the planning and zoning processes in the communities, as well as the stream and water quality data that are available. The checklist can be used as a tool to begin conversations about preparedness and can be used to inform town residents about the level of protection from flooding in their town.
The following is a video documenting the meeting; can you pick out The South Lake Team?
High Meadows Fund Recipient
In July, 2015, the South Lake Watershed Partnership, organized by the District, was honored to receive a High Meadows Fund grant to promote flood resiliency in the Flower Brook watershed. The District has met with the governing bodies of the three towns in the watershed, Danby, Pawlet, and Tinmouth, and received support from each to move ahead with the grant work. If you live in or near one of these communities, please look for our outreach meetings and workshops in your area. Our goal is to connect with a diverse group of stakeholders to promote projects that increase flood resiliency in the Flower Brook watershed. Examples of these projects might include, increasing infiltration and disbursement of road runoff before it enters a waterbody, installing larger culverts at road crossings, or protecting sensitive headwater streams that are prone to erosion and gully formation.