Lafayette County Board’s Resolution Warning Media About Water Quality Coverage Dropped

Lafayette County officials say their county board will no longer consider a resolution to limit what information is released to the public from a regional water quality study.

A resolution introduced for a vote at an emergency meeting of the Lafayette County Land Conservation Committee would have limited who can receive future test results of the Southwestern Wisconsin Groundwater and Geology (SWIGG) study. The proposal first appeared on the board agenda published Thursday.

But Lafayette County Corporation Counsel Nathan Russell confirmed Friday the committee would no longer be considering the resolution. When asked why the proposal was removed from the agenda, Russell said the resolution was not necessary.

The resolution called for future SWIGG test results only to be given to the chairs of the Iowa, Grant and Lafayette county boards, county conservationists and the chair of the boards’ land conservation committee. Those individuals would create a press release to share information with the public and all other county board members, warning that the statement would have to be printed without alteration.

The resolution warns media not to “glean information and selectively report it in order to interpret the results for their own means,” warning “violators will be prosecuted.”

The resolution also called for any board member caught “speaking to the press without the express authority to represent their Committee, Full County Board or the Review Board” to be censured by their county board and “publicly admonished.”

Lafayette County Board member Kriss Marion said the resolution was not considered by the land conservation committee at their regular monthly meeting Tuesday. She said she had to ask for a copy of the resolution, which was scheduled to be voted on by the full county board meeting pending its approval at the committee meeting.

Neither Marion nor Russell knew who authored the proposed resolution. But Marion said she believes the measure is likely a result of misrepresentation of test results published by the SWIGG study in August.

SWIGG researchers retested a group of private wells that had previously tested positive for contamination and found 32 of the 35 tested positive again.

“What happened was some news outlets that were printing paragraph-long, very short news pieces on this just said 91 percent of tested wells in southwest Wisconsin are contaminated. That was not accurate. It was a really poor interpretation of a very complicated story,” Marion said.

The proposed resolution references “a county board leak of confidential information” from the SWIGG study as reasoning for the new procedures. But Marion said all the test results that have been published are public information and available on Iowa County’s Extension website.

“None of this was confidential and there certainly wasn’t a leak on the part of someone at the county,” Marion said. “But this feels like it’s trying to threaten individuals who work for the county, individuals who are county supervisors, from discussing SWIGG results with their constituents or with the press and I have a fundamental problem with that.”

She said there is no evidence of a leak or an effort to slander southwest Wisconsin.

County officials in Grant and Iowa counties say similar resolutions have not been introduced to their county boards at this time.