Four Township Water Resources Council History
by Dr. Kenneth M. Kornheiser
Note: Click here for Four Townships Watershed Resource Documents
In the fall of 1993, a meeting was convened at the Richland Township Hall in Kalamazoo County for the purpose of gathering together interested parties, stakeholders and agencies to discuss preservation of the Gull Lake and Augusta Creek Watersheds. The primary organizers were the W.S. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS), of Michigan State University (MSU) which owns and operates research and public facilities on and around Gull Lake and Augusta Creek and MSU Extension (MSUE). The meeting included representatives from the Barry and Kalamazoo County Planning Departments and Planning Commissions, Road Commissions and Drain Commissioners and Conservation Districts; the Potawatomi Regional Conservation District; the Michigan Departments of Environmental Quality (DEQ), Natural Resources (DNR), and Agriculture; the Gull Lake Quality Organization (GLQO) and Augusta Creek Watershed Association (ACWA) and members of the Boards of Trustees and Planning Commissions of the four Townships which included the bulk of these two watersheds, Barry and Prairieville in Barry County and Richland and Ross in Kalamazoo County.
At the conclusion of that meeting, a call was issued for those individuals that were interested in creating watershed management plans and strategies to organize and carry on. This resulted in a collection of representatives from the GLQO, ACWA, Barry County Planning Department and the Planning Commissions of 3 of the 4 Townships involved. (Barry Township was planned by the Barry County Planning Department.) KBS and MSUE provided meeting space and support office staff and facilities for organizational meetings for the next 4 years. After extensive meetings and research, this group founded the Four Township Water Resources Council (FTWRC) as a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation in 1997.
KBS and MSUE continued to provide meeting and work space, staff and clerical support for the next several years for FTWRC. The MSU Department of Geography provided the first of many project grants that FTWRC was to receive over its lifetime. The Four Township watersheds would serve as a demonstration model for a Geographical Information System based on environmentally significant layers. GIS was a relatively new process at that time.
The FTWRC constituted itself as a dues paying membership organization with individual and family memberships and the novel idea of Township memberships in which the four townships comprising the bulk of the two principal watersheds became supporting members paying for the environmental services which the Council provided. In addition to the extensive community outreach efforts which the Council conducted and cooperation with the four townships and MSUE at KBS, much of the success of the FTWRC was due to many other partnerships. There are too many to list all of them here, but some of the most important were with the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council, the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, Western Michigan University, the Barry County Planning Department, the Michigan Departments of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources and the GLQO.
The FTWRC was organized as a Board of Directors managed organization. With only one brief exception, there were no paid staffers. Over the next almost 40 years, the Council obtained many grants to conduct its programs. Many of these grants provided funding to hire consultants or contractors to manage these programs and provide necessary expertise and leadership. Several early grants came from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the Michigan Environmental Council. Once a pattern of results was established and with the support of our partners, the Council obtained large grants from the Michigan Clean Water Initiative, Section 319 Nonpoint Source Pollution Control Program of the Federal EPA and Michigan DEQ and the W.S. Kellogg Foundation and others.
Over the life of the FTWRC, it received almost $3 million dollars of grant funding. The heart of these grants was the creation of a Watershed Management Plan for the Four Township Area and programs to implement that goals of that Plan. The first Plan was approved by the DEQ in 1998 with updates approved in 2010 and 2017. Projects conducted began with research, guidance and support for the Land Use Plans and Zoning Ordinances governing the Four Townships. Later these grants included many research projects, such as a Natural Features Inventory, a Breeding Bird Survey, Carrying Capacity Studies for the major lakes, a Water Atlas, a Groundwater Studies, an Impervious Surfaces Analysis, a Manure Application Study and Surface Water Quality Testing.
A major element in FTWRC activities was public outreach and education. Many lectures, seminars, panel discussions, meetings with the general public, topic or area specific stakeholders and presentations to county and township boards and commissions were conducted. A large collection of research and guidance publications were made public and down-loadable on the FTWRC web page (ftwrc.org). Some educational efforts were directed to students, the most important being training sessions on the use of a water quality curriculum for the teaching staff of each elementary school in the Four Township area. The curriculum was created by members of MSU Extension and the program was funded by the W.S. Kellogg Foundation.
Every year FTWRC staged an Annual Meeting in the KBS Auditorium for Members and open to the public in which Council activities and plans were presented. Each Annual Meeting also featured speakers on an important water quality topic of particular relevance to the Four Township community. The Council also organized a Kanoe the Kazoo event every year. These were organized and guided paddle trips within a program conducted throughout the Kalamazoo River Watershed that took citizens onto inland lakes in our watersheds and onto the Kalamazoo River where it traversed parts of the Four Townships.
During the height of the COVID pandemic years of 2020-21, the Council greatly reduced our public activity. With the exception of Kanoe the Kazoo paddle events and a couple of special in person Board Meetings conducted outdoors, the only public activities conducted by FTWRC were on-line virtual Board of Director Meetings. In addition, although many chronic pressures on water quality continued unabated, such as those caused by the response to high water levels in the Four Township lakes and the presence of manure applications by CAFOs, there were no issues demanding a concerted effort. With this forced hiatus, citizen participation and interactions with the Four Townships diminished.
After conducting calls to the public for new members, Board Directors and issues of importance and surveys to gauge the desire for a continued presence, the Council decided that it was appropriate to dissolve as a public entity. The Board negotiated with the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council, which is the umbrella organization that manages the entire Kalamazoo River watershed including the Four Township area subwatersheds, to assume responsibility for the Watershed Management Plan and its implementation and to maintain online availability of the Council’s publications. And financial assets were distributed between the KRWC, the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy and the Joe Johnson Endowment for Wildlife Conservation Fellowships to carry on the mission of the Four Township Water Resources Council.
Note: Click here for Four Townships Watershed Resource Documents