celery pond

I’ve been told that there are decent recipes out there for cattail soup. If you come across one, please mail it to the blog comments and share it.

Also of treat value is the Black River Watershed and Paw Paw Watershed Community Expo from 5p-7pm at the Van Buren Conference Center( 490 South Paw Paw Street in Lawrence). They have treats galore: the usual candy and lots of material and contacts to gather on wetlands and watersheds. (See last Thursday’s post for full info.) There might even be a table on Celery Pond.

Kevin Anderson, South Haven’s City Manager, did quickly respond to my email question on the Phoenix Street drain that pours into Celery Pond. He wrote: “The stormwater drain into the Celery Pond is part of a county drain and the decision to route was made by the county drain commissioner on advice of their engineers. I do not know their reasons for their design. However, I can, at least generally, speak to the Walmart expansion. Local building and zoning codes required that stormwater detention/retention be provided when construction like this occurs.” (A stormwater drain into a wetland, is still an item to question, and I will go further with this.)

Being aware of what causes storm water pollution is important because it gives you the first step to do something to help our municipality. You can report any dumping of inappropriate materials into storm water drains (such as antifreeze, oil) to your local municipal officials. The same with construction sites that do not have erosion or sediment controls, let your local officials know.

You can also use good housekeeping practices in your own with lawn careful handling of chemicals, gas, oil, pet wastes, etc. By telling others about pollution from storm water runoff, you can spread the word about what they can do too to help.

We can all work together to help start a recycle and safety program and try to safely dispose of used oil and household hazardous wastes. Michigan’s storm water program, with everyone’s help, can be a success to keep our streams, rivers and lakes clean and open to use, as well as making a healthy home for animals and plants. It becames more treats, and no tricks, in gaining understanding of the effects of rain and man’s treatment of nature and his development of property.

The Environmental Protection Agency has coined a universal slogan: “Clean Water Is Everybody’s Business.” Clean water should be our concern, particulary since South Haven is on one of the biggest fresh water lakes in the world, Lake Michigan. Protecting that water quality is an issue related to our decisions and also to the function of the wetlands.

As more and more land surface becomes covered by pavements and buildings, the ground has less ability to soak in the waters from rain and snowmelt. The more we develop with major coverage of the land, the more the storm drains begin to carry more run-off waters that spiral off from roofs and paved areas into nearby waterways. Oil, dirt, chemicals and lawn fertilizers are taken into the stormwater and, when entering directly into streams and rivers, seriously harm water quality.

Development needs to be designed and needs to be built to minimize the increase in runoff to protect the surface water quality and the groundwater resources. Forests and wetlands, as well as grasslands, trap rainwater and snowmelt. Forests and wetlands are needed as they let stormwaters filter slowly into the ground.

The studies done by EPA compare natural ground cover to impervious covered surfaces like pavements, and rooftops in high density developments. One important statistic is that a typical city block generates 5 times more runoff than in a woodland area of the same size.

The reason? The impervious cover, if up to 75%-100% of the land, has a 55% runoff which only allows 10% shallow infiltration of waters, 5% deep infiltration, and 30% evaporation. In contrast, natural ground cover has a 10% runoff, with 25% infiltration at shallow levels, 25% deep infiltration, 40% evapotranspiration in a 10% runoff. If South Haven begins to cover more and more of its land surfaces, loss of infiltration from this urbanization will result in groudwater changes that can have profound impact.

Pollutants going into streams and rivers harm fish and wildlife populations and can kill wildlife population. Pollutants make for foul drinking water supplies and create unpleasant and unsafe recreational areas.

The natural filtration of the Celery Pond and forestland area around it provide the natural ground cover to absorb runoffs. I’ve heard that the Phoenix Street stormwater drain empties into the Pond. While it probably does affect the quality of plant and animal life within the Pond, at least it is not at risk of putting urban runoff into our river and lake because the wetland contains it and acts as a natural filter to its deposit of toxins.

Celery Pond is a very needed wetland. To cut a channel into the Pond to accomodate a marina, could put urban runoff from the Phoenix stormwater drain directly into Black River, Lake Michigan and into the recreational areas.

As a footnote: When I inquired with different South Havenites about the Phoenix Street stormwater drain, wanting to know when it was routed into the Pond, I was told it had to do with redirecting waters from the building of Walmart and all its paved surfaces. As I really want the facts behind why a storm drain was allowed to be put into a wetland and when it was installed, I have made an inquiry with the City Manager. When I get his answer, I’ll let you know.

Brown water and green weeds sounds like a description of Black River and the waters that outflow from the north pier area into the lake. The brown water often reaches the lakeshore after a storm and makes you think you’d never want to swim in the lake again.

When there’s been a heavy rainfall or even when water from snow is melting and travels across city streets and farm fields, it takes all sorts of things with it. Soil particles, pesticides, pet wastes, oil and other toxic materials flow into our waterways and become “Nonpoint Source Pollution.” Go to the North public beach after a heavy rainstorm and look at the overflow by the pier going down to the water, a phenomena which happens repeatedly. Look at the murky lakeshore water.

When water is cloudy or “turbid” (much like looking into Black River or a runoff area as above), it’s difficult for fish to see and feed properly. It’d be like us trying to operate in extreme fog that was brown and murky. Turbid water is caused by sediments from soil particles that have eroded from construction sites, streambanks, and croplands that then travel with rain water or melting snows into lakes and streams. This run-off turns water brown.

Because fish and aquatic insects lay their eggs on gravel beds in the waterways, these deposits of sediments (which filter to the bottom) cover the spawning habitats. The sediments also destroy the natural “riffle and pool” pattern in the flowing water stream.

Sediments not only cloud the water, they also cover plant leaves and weaken sunlight penetration. This in turn inhibits photosynthesis (plant food production). Without photosynthesis, the desirable plantlife is reduced, taking away the source of food for fish and small organisms and also eliminating placesfor them to live in. The murky water also contains millions of abrasvie soil particles that shift around in the water and can “scour” aquatic plants and animals, removing them from their homes.

If a stream becomes shallower and wider, sediment deposits are working on it. This increases flooding problems. Shallow water, heated more by the sun, warms water temps and changes the type of fish that come into the water. Cold water fish, like trout who prefer cool, deep and fast waters, are replaced by warm water fish.

Boaters and swimmers are also affected by sediment buildup. Propellers, rudders and keels can run aground and silted swimming areas can be undesirable and even dangerous, as deep holes can be filled with loose sediment.

Sedimentation is a major contributor to Nonpoint Source Pollution. The delicate balance of aquatic communities is totally upset by nonpoint source pollution, and needs to be understood. Fish and wildlife are forced to find new homes where cool, clean water exists. Water that is brown with sediment needs local communites to work together to improve water quality.

The Michigan Nonpoint Source Program specifically works with communities in the watershed to improve water quality. Check the internet address at www.dep.state.mi.us/swq/nps/npshome.htm or call the Kalamazoo district office at 269-567-3500, to learn more. You can also go to the great offering next Tuesday in Lawrence, given by the Black River Watershed people in Lawrence. Join the Watershed Community Expo from 5-7pm. 

E-News from the Black River Watershed, Erin Fuller, came in the other day and I thought you might want to know about this. Check your calendars if you’re free and try to pool rides if you can. It’s about 8 miles away from Bangor.

Watershed Community Expo: Watersheds, Water Quality, Lakes, River, Land Use Issues

Tuesday, October

5:00-7:00 pm

Van Buren Conference Center, 490 S. Paw Paw St, Lawrence, MI

This will be a different kind of trick or treating experience, according to Erin. There will be displays from over 20 exhibitors who are experts in the field and have materials for you to put in your treats bag. Candy is also included, how lucky can you get! Learn about protecting water quality and natural resources and go back to South Haven’s city meetings with your treats of information.

Network, network, network. Treat our water and natural resources with added protection and treat yourself too for gathering more resource materials on safe drinking water, groundwater, wetlands, lakes, rivers, zoning and planning, as well as learning about conservation options for landowners and agricultural programs for better water quality.

The Black River Watershed Project is hosting this event. To check on more information you can contact Marcy at (269) 925-1137×25.

The coastline of Michigan is covered with many watersheds that flow from the interior with branches of the river’s tributaries through many miles and into Lake Michigan. In southwestern Michigan the Galien River Watershed borders the St. Joseph Watershed, the Kalamazoo River Watershed is above that with the Black River and the Macatawa River Watersheds bordering the Lake. For watershed management the diversity of land use patterns makes working together essential but also very diverse.

Chris Bauer, an Environmental Analyst from the Water Bureau of the MDEQ, spoke at the Watershed Management Short Course last week. She asked the group, “Who is involved in watershed management?” The answer was everyone.

Chris reminded us that water crosses political boundaries in the watershed and it requires working together. A management program identifies the multiple problems and solutions through working partnerships.

Nonpoint source pollution or diffuse pollution sources were asked to be identified by States after 1987 with amendements to the Clean Water Act. Under Section 319 of the CWA, (b)(4) Developement On Watershed Basis, “A State shall, to the maximum extent practicable, develop and implement a management program under this subsection on a watershed-by-watershed basis within such State.” Involving the local public and private agencies, is key to the Watershed plan. The short course for the Black River and Paw Paw River Watersheds, being held in Lawrence during the month of October, has been part of that long-term plan, showing the fruitful efforts of its many years of running.

Chris Bauer also outlined the numerous steps for plans to emerge and then to be approved. Along with the public input and partnerships of Federal, state and local experts, data is gathered, inventories made , and the sources, causes and pollutants’ level are quantified and then prioritized with the objectives determined. Currently the area of southwest Michigan has many watershed programs in operation, with some areas overlapping with two such programs.

Program funding comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (about $6million annually, with a $4million match required). Within the Clean Michigan Initiative, an amount of $675million, waterfronts, local parks, state parks and nonpoint sources each receive $50million with other distributions going to clean water fund and brownfields, etc. What is sought is the “Best Management Practices” (BMPs) for the diverse land users such as cows, who are managed better with water from the tanks instead of streams. Likewise, “green” development and soft approaches to the river edge have a better low maintenance management and effect than rigid seawalls.

The biggest challenge, Chris said, is identifying the cause, rather than just addressing the symptom. In fact, there are BMPs for forestry, golf courses, agriculture, and guidebooks for Michigan’s watersheds. Knowing more about hydrology, and controlling pollutants makes for a better tomorrow, and what Chris showed in her last slide, for “our legacy for the next generation.” To learn more about these programs, she recommended that we look at www.michigan.gov/deqnps

Tickets for members can be reserved (special email to follow) next week, before ticket sales open to the public. Tickets will be at a downtown location, to be announced, on November 1. (Tickets are $30 a person.)

We hope you will sign up for our fun-raising=fundraising party. As creativity is the theme of our group, along with the love of nature and the real commitment to want to preserve green spaces with added perks as educational tie-ins, we hope the spirit will be become more and more contagious for the whole community.

Due to the size of the space, we’re limiting ourselves to 60 tickets for the cocktail party. Please note.

To join our membership, please select your level of membership and include your name, address, city/state/zip and email address. Our mailing address is: Celery Pond Advocates, PO Box 693, South Haven, MI 49090.

Levels of membership include:

• _______$10 Student/Senior (60 years+)
• _______$15 Individual
• _______ $25 Couple
• _______$30 Family
  
• _______$31-250 Big Advocate
• _______Anything above listed amounts Honorary Advocate
  

Checks can be made out to Celery Pond Advocates, and a letter of confirmation will follow upon receipt.

A few questions have come in this week on the status of the Celery Pond file. As of last Friday when I did the FOIA request with Kalamazoo MDEQ, the file was closed.

It had been re-opened by Barney Pero and a representative from MacGregor King on August 28th, and this plan was approved by the Council on October 2nd. But, much to every one’s surprise, the file was closed four days later, completing one cycle for resubmitting a plan which has to be done in a 6 month period after the plan is withdrawn for the first time.

Most importantly in this turn around, is the fact that many more letters of protest were written and entered into the file. And, several hundred signatures of people wanting to keep the wetland as a wetland, with no marina/channel cut development, were also documented.

When the file is re-opened, this will be for the final time that a re-submission will be allowed. The three developers have up to 6 months to re-activate the proposal, and then 90 days from that date are given for the MDEQ to decide. As it is not likely that a second public hearing will be held during this process, this new information is important to have been placed into the file.

Also represented is the plan of the Celery Pond Avocates to create a non-profit group which will seek to acquire, protect and preserve the wetland. We are currently in that step-by-step process, hoping that the MDEQ’s original plan to deny the first permit application will be the same for any future action of reactivating the project.

The proposed new mitigation site was also visited on October 3rd by the author, with permission of the property owner, who is not Barney Pero. Pero has promised the council that he would buy the property if approvals are given by MDEQ.

According to Pero, there is also a tributary of Black River on the property, but no such tributary is shown either on site survey maps or was seen on the visit. There was a ditch with supposed city drain on the property. Is this considered a tributary? Not in wetland terminology. Mitigation wants access to a river or stream with close proximity to the original wetland. This site, between 64th and 66th Streets between Phoenix and 8th Avenue, is over 5 miles away and surely not in close proximity.

We can only think that when another resubmission of the plan re-opens the file that it will have the same logistics as this Pero plan with 40 less slips and this mitigation site. Keep you eye on City activity of workshops and council meetings to watch for further action.

Kevin Anderson expressed that he was “befuddled” by the re-submission done by Pero, yet Anderson seems to have had no such issue on proceeding along his proposed timeline to take-on the Dunkley Re-development area. In one minute he was saying to close the file to MacGregor, and in another minute, he was taking the recommendation of Fahs-Paull to vote on the re-submission on October 2nd. The Council did approve Pero’s ideas, which of course included the channel cut, as you know.

So while the file was then open, it closed 4 days later with a MacGregor email to close the file. This email has been said to have been written on September 20th but never made it into MDEQ’s email box. Don’t be befuddled. That email to close the file for the three developers, though 2 weeks late to reach Kameron Jordan’s email, was the tool to shut the file on October 6th.

This is all in line with the city’s timeline. They plan to proceed. But then, so do we, and more will be following as the whole scenario proceeds.

The dredging of the details is something to behold, as the city’s credibility is more and more challenged by the public. Timelines that are projected as such, when one minute the channel cut is there, then the next minute, it is not there but it really is understood to be there, is all a bit of a befuddlement or bepuddlement. Stay tuned and bring your galoshes and your spectacles.

“It all begins with the watershed….” was the opening theme of the Watershed Management Short Course for the Black River and Paw Paw River Watersheds, given during October 2006. This course was credited last week, making mention of the wonderful lecture on watershed science by Dr. Lusch from MSU.

Water quality and Land Use Impacts were this past Tuesday’s bounty. Lecturers included Jane Herbert from the Kellogg Biological Station, Steve Bare, Natural Resources Conservation, Sarah VanDelfzijl, MDEQ Enviornmental Quality Analyst, Del Spies, Michigan Waterfront Alliance, and Chris Bauer, Environmental Analyst from MDEQ. This was a full slate for one evening…and each speaker made us remember, that ‘It all begins with the watershed.’

An aerial picture of South Haven’s piers and Black River, shown by Steve Bare, caught the South Haven attendees by surprise. Just earlier he was showing how walled steel structures which normally line river marinas are not adaptable to the life in the water, whereas rocks and more natural banking of soil, grass and logs, give a natural border which is where the water creatures live.

There was our harbor, full of a reconfigured river path to accomodate the many marina slips, forming a man-made steel girded harbor. Most surprising however was the glorious Celery Pond which, from that camera angle, looked like the natural course of wetland coming from the Lake/River connection. Its purpose was given to us at the very creation of the watershed.

The mouth of the Black River is the beginning of the Black River Watershed and truly, by air, one begins to understand the importance of Celery Pond and the reason to keep it as a nature reserve for wildlife and for filtration. We need Celery Pond.

How lucky we are to have this wetland of 23-29 acres right in our downtown area. What a thrill it will be for generations to come to visit it and see that a group of concerned citizens and neighbors in the watershed decided to stop another marina to save it.

There will be a CPA meeting tonight at 6pm at the Public Library.

Just as the ecosystems of nature and the watersheds overlap and need one another in joint collaborations, so do we humans have to begin to listen to one another to reach more informed answers to questions. We also need to find more judicious solutions to imposing demands of developers. We have to educate ourselves first, and then make sure that our elected officials, particularly our ward people, have basic understanding and sensitivity to highly charged environmental issues that can have adverse effects on all of us for a long time.

We cannot waste time holding onto closed-minded viewpoints. We have to make choices that lead to balanced decision-making that isn’t so lopsided for giving developers what they want and the city only what it seems to want, ie. the tax dollars. We have to re-think the whole political, economic and environmental planning. We need to revise and implement a much more comprehensive Master Plan that is in tune with the times.

Erin Fuller, Coordinator of the Black River Watershed Management Plan, will be meeting with city officials next year to encourage re-writing of Master Plans and re-structing of zoning ordinances. I made a recommendation to Janice Varney, Executive Dean of Lake Michigan College in South Haven, to set-up some environmental workshops with Erin’s guidance in the new year as well. If these workshops happen, it would be advised that you invite your ward rep or your planning commissioners. To assure their attendance, have them come with you to hear what will be said. An email and phone-call isn’t enough. Listening to the information, reading about it, and re-evaluating our goals is a mighty call to do, but a critical one to activate.

The water’s aquatic ecosystem and the land’s terrrestrial ecosystem overlap at the coastal ecosystem, and what happens in one reverberates effects in another. So too the Council/City Manager’s ecosystem overlaps with an often different public opinion ecosystem and the overlappping middle of these two circles, is where the developers try to get their plans installed.

But in that overlap, there is not a natural harmony as nature devised. Nature does not have an agenda of overbearing self-interests to deal with. A much wiser Creator installed their plan to keep harmony. If the human race truly wishes to duplicate that higher harmony, they have to let go of motivations of self-interests; they have to know love and respect for the environment first, before any consideration of change is made.

This is not a tree-hugger’s plea. This is demand that is coming forth from the lowest to the highest strata of concerned, educated professionals and governments. We share one world, and one atmosphere. What we have done in the past is surely completing itself and meeting us, like the global warming.

It is not too late for us to change our thinking and move forward, working together as a community who is seeking solutions of integrity. The desperation to capture tax dollars to fix streets, etc. is the old thinking compared to the new need to sustain and maintain the susceptible balances of the planet’s ecosystems right down into South Haven’s Celery Pond and adjacent floodplain area.

The everchanging soils of the freshwater Great Lakes shoreline are unique and delicate as they are prone to movement and/or erosion. Natural features as a coastal bluff, sand dunes, wetlands and floodplains, are natural resources that can easily be destroyed or significantly altered by ambitious land use activities. The cycle of rising and falling water levels in the Great Lakes makes the wetlands and floodplains, in particular, essential to be left in their natural state to accomodate crucial services to wildlife and society.

The MDEQ file on Celery Pond is temporarily closed. Once it is reopened, I encourage you to write letters, which show an informed response to the idea of making a wetland into a marina, and a floodplain into a condo development. I encourage you to write to your government officials now as well. Keep the channels of information open.

The pressures on a public official to vote in the ways that the people want is what democracy is about. We cannot compromise on these critical issues of creating a future for ourselves and our children. You can sign our on-line petition as well, which runs every weekend on the blog with text and email address. You can join the Celery Pond Advocates in membership to join our efforts to set-up a conservancy that seeks to acquire, manage and protect the wetland and adjacent lands. Your participation is very important.