River News

Monitoring our water resources along the Clinton River, throughout the watershed and Lake St. Clair has been the focus of the Clinton River Watershed Council for nearly 38 years. It started out with a hand full of dedicated people who cared deeply about what was going on in their own backyard with water quality and water quantity. They fought against channelizing important sections of the river in order to keep the landscape as natural as possible.

A team of volunteers assist with installing 50 white pine seedlings at Beaudette Park in Pontiac during our River Day celebration 2009.

As a result, we have many beautiful open sections of river that define this watershed as a unique urban system. What is important in monitoring this system today is to understand how we are impacting the water resource and what we can do to prevent creating problems on our river and lake. Whether it is an urban or rural environment, the little things we can do to monitor the way we use our water resources can help. We have come a long way since that small handful of determined citizens and council of governments from 1972 decided to make a difference in doing what it takes to protect and monitor our water.

Today, we have 1.5 million people that live in our watershed. The Council has 55 government member communities. We have graduated nearly 70,000 students from our stream leaders program. The Adopt-A-Stream program has grown to include over 270 volunteers. Our monitoring partners include four active Trout Unlimited chapters, two steelhead groups and a consortium of over 3000 boaters active in the Anchor Bay Yachting Association (ABYA), over 30 businesses, engineering and planning firms and seven Subwatershed Advisory Groups. All monitoring over 760 square miles of watershed and Lake St. Clair. That is a lot of people and a lot of monitoring.

Stream leaders work to monitor our water resources.

By now, we know what we have to do to get the job done but we are still learning too. We continue to reach out to our community and stakeholders telling the watershed story and assisting in the education and stewardship for water resource protection. We honor our watershed watchdogs as they continue to help us in sampling for water quality indicators, educating our public on low impact development practices like storm water management planning and the right time to apply fertilizer. We appreciate our watershed champions who are so dedicated in preserving this remarkable resource right in the middle of our cities, townships, villages, schools and our neighborhoods. We are al-ways interested in recruiting new members and volunteers into our communities to help us with our stewardship and educational activities.

Contact us today to see how you can help.