Meet our newest BECWA Board Member: John Donaldson

I am honored to be asked to take a seat on the BECWA Board, a group I have long admired. Not sure, but I suspect I may have written the first ever newspaper article about BECWA, which came to be in the wake of the Refuse Hideaway Sanitary Landfill controversy in the 1980s. The landfill was not really hidden that well, and was anything but sanitary: it was leaking leachate into fractured sandstone fissures very near the headwaters of Black Earth Creek. Several wells near the landfill were condemned as the VOCs spread in the groundwater plume. The founders of BECWA saw an urgent need for an active community response to this threat. Refuse Hideaway eventually was designated a Superfund site and clean-up continues to this day.

At the time, I was editor of the News-Sickle-Arrow, a post I held for 42 years. The NSA covered the villages and towns of Mazomanie, Black Earth and Cross Plains, as well as the towns of Arena, Berry and Vermont: In other words, the Black Earth Creek Watershed. So when Steve Born sauntered into my office in Black Earth and started telling me about his plan to form a watershed association, I was intrigued both professionally and personally. Personally because of my profound relationship with the Black Earth Creek, a love affair that began very early in my life.

My parents moved my brother and I to our new home just west of Black Earth when I was three years old and he was 11. It was a farmette divided by USH 14, which was constructed in 1937. “The Old Stuart Place” featured our house, a barn, a field and a craggy bluff topped with a large rock formation on the north side, and the Black Earth Creek and some additional pasture and work land to the south. In the 19th century, Bert Stuart built a mill on the northern bank of the creek and when we arrived in 1957, the supports for the long-gone mill still extended out into the water. As kids we would dive off these stout timbers into the deep hole scoured out by “Stuart’s Falls,” a rapids made up of what remained of the dam that had formed a millpond extending back to the village. I was hooked.

I went on to spend countless hours along the creek, swimming, fishing, trapping or just taking it all in. After graduating from Wisconsin Heights in 1972, I earned a Journalism degree at the UW-Madison. I was already editing the NSA. In the 90s my brother and I inherited the Old Stuart Place and a few years later we sold the creekside property to the state as a conservancy area for all to enjoy.

I would have loved to have joined BECWA at its inception, but as a journalist I had a self-imposed policy against joining advocacy organizations I was covering. I am glad to have this opportunity now that I have retired.

John Donaldson

Welcome to the Board!