- All right, our next speaker is Greg Kleinheinz.
Greg is the Viessmann Chair of Sustainable Technology
and a professor of Environmental Engineering Technology
at UW-Oshkosh.
In his laboratory, the Environmental Research
and Innovations Center, ERIC,
at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
serves as a research and testing center
for environmental health professionals,
industries looking to evaluate materials for bio-gas,
and conducting a variety of customized research projects.
Greg's also been heavily involved with
our work here in Door County, trying to keep our beaches
clean and safe for tourists and visitors.
And with that, Greg, I'll turn it over to you.
I'll try not to get too mixed up here.
If I don't trip and fall over, it'll be a good thing.
- I'm good?
All right, well thank you to UW-Extension and Crossroads
and this is Wednesday Nite at the Lab
and for me this is really the lab.
So actually this facility is the lab that we operate
in Door County for routine beach monitoring
and so it's appropriate for us,
even though it's Monday night, it is the lab,
and, in fact, today what I want to talk to you
a little bit about is Door County
and put the work that's been done here in perspective
and you may hear me a few times today say that,
you know, when you live here and you work here
and you're used to the things that go on here,
we really take those things for granted,
but it's not really the way that it is everywhere else.
So what are the things that we're concerned with?
What do we do about contamination?
And then what are the benefits of healthy beaches?
And I think lots of times people think about beaches
in terms of the environmental side of things
or in some cases the public health side of things,
but there's really an economic and social importance
to those beaches as well, so hopefully today
we'll talk a little bit about those.
And I always tell my students at the end of class,
you're not gonna listen to most of things I tell you,
but there's a couple take home messages
so by the time you all leave today,
I hope that one or two little tidbits
of the things that I've talked about
may be making you look at the 30 or 40 odd beaches
in the county a little bit differently.
And so one of the things I can't say enough about
is the partnerships and when I had
the UW-Oshkosh logo in here,
I'd love to say I did all the work.
I happen to be the mouthpiece right now,
but it's really been a collaborative effort.
A couple county agencies in particular,
the Health Department,
and Soil and Water Conversation Department,
and several others here and certainly our students.
And so we have four of 'em
that work here this summer present today.
I didn't bribe them to come listen to me talk,
but there's been over 100 of them working
on various projects in the county,
and I think from their perspective,
and certainly from my perspective,
it's been a rewarding experience for all of them.
And, of course, when you put these up,
it's sort of like thanking somebody
when you win an award and you forget to thank your mother.
There's invariable somebody you forget,
and on the slide I actually realized I forgot
one group that's really been a big sponsor for the county
and that's Wisconsin Coastal Management Program,
and so if they're listening,
don't hold it against the county.
So to put things in perspective,
there are 882 beaches on the Great Lakes.
That's pretty significant.
Now, it depends on what you consider a beach,
so in Wisconsin, we have 117 beaches.
There's actually many more of them
if you consider the definition of a beach
anywhere that there's public access.
This is the DNR's definition of a beach,
and so this is what we consider from a regulatory standpoint
or from a municipal standpoint.
And so with that, in 2012, nationwide,
out of all the different beaches,
over 1,500 had at least one advisory
and 5,700 had some sort of notification issue.
Most of those are one or two days,
and I think people that are familiar with beaches
see the red closed sign or the yellow advisory sign go up
and we'll talk more about that, and then it just disappears,
and that's sometimes concerning.
And, what's wrong; that's not normal.
In fact, that's very normal.
That's a little frustrating if you're the beach manager,
live in those municipalities, but that is very normal.
Some beaches in Wisconsin, for example,
there are beaches that are closed
more than 40% of the beach days.
So imagine that over the summer,
more than 40% of the time those beaches are closed.
To put Door County in perspective for everyone,
here's the county, these are the beaches
that have been identified by the DNR.
There's over 52 of them.
27 of the Great Lakes beaches are
monitored through the Beach Act
of the Health Department and our program.
Most are high priority.
So there's more high-priority beaches,
which means they get monitored more often
than anywhere else in the state, in Door County.
There's three inland lakes and this is a take home message.
Only 4% of all the samples result in any sort of advisory,
and less than 1% of those samples
result in the beach being closed.
So it's a very, very small amount,
and so even though that we have things
that we'd like to improve upon in the county
and, in my opinion, any closure or any advisory is too many,
the county does remarkably well in being proactive,
and we'll sort of talk more about that as we go on,
but it's really part of culture.
So I'm a Wisconsin native, I grew up here.
I kind of went to the dark side for a little bit
and went to Michigan and then came back,
but that's all right, I'm here, and so I remember as a kid
going to the beaches in my hometown.
I remember traveling to Door County, northern Wisconsin.
We have counties here that have 1,700 lakes
within their borders, so that's Vilas County.
And then we have counties like Door
that are literally peninsulas that are surrounded
by Great Lakes that people just can't get enough of.
Here's some historical, these are from
the Door County Historical Society.
It doesn't look like the swimsuits we see today,
but the one in the upper left is actually
the Alpine Resort, and you'll see that
a little bit later as we go through this.
But, really, this is an important part of the culture
and our heritage in Wisconsin,
and I think sometimes that gets lost,
but I think anybody that grew up in the state,
I probably am going out on a limb,
that can remember at some point they visited
a beach or recreational water body in some cases.
I, in fact, went to a meeting, and I was going
to the Caribbean Water and Wastewater Association.
It was in the Bahamas; it was terrible.
And somebody said, you know, I've been to Wisconsin
and your beaches look very similar to ours.
I'd never been to the Great Lakes
but they're like inland oceans and that's really amazing.
And I started thinking about it
and I started looking at pictures and I'm like, yeah.
This looks, you know, pretty similar.
There's Caribbean beaches and,
there's some Lake Michigan beaches
and they do have some contrast, or some similarities.
And then this is it in January, and this is us in January.
So I said they're a little different.
You need to come back in January.
They said, no, no, that's too cold.
She was wearing a sweater and it was 78 degrees.
So, I guess that point is we do take a lot
of this for granted, I mean these are inland seas.
When we talk about water issues and water wars,
if you hear about it, it's really going to be the gold
of the next century and we have so much of it here,
we take much of that for granted
even though we do have a small window
in which we can use it, right?
So unless you are ice fishing or like we're in Oshkosh now,
they do sturgeon spearing.
Anybody seen that? That's an amazing event.
So there's a lot of ways people in the state have realized
how they can utilize those resources.
So what are we concerned with at the beach?
The first one we hear about, the thing that makes most
of the news is E. coli.
So that's the indicator organism that we're going to talk about.
And so I want to start with a little bit of microbiology,
and so bear with me for many of you
that may have heard this either from me
or other people that have given talks here
other places around the county
because there are many that have.
But E. coli is this organism that's found
in all warm blooded animals.
It's a transient member of the sort of microbial ecology
around us, and so it isn't anything new or unusual.
It's been there.
It's like the chicken and the egg.
What came first E. coli or the first warm blooded animal?
I don't know, but the primary host of this
is that warm blooded animal.
There's a secondary environment, that's the beach in this case,
or it could be a number of things,
but we're going to talk about it with respect to beach water.
And so once that mammalian host releases that E.coli
it comes out into the environment.
Sometimes you can re-uptake that E.coli.
It's not very pleasant to think about,
but many of the diseases that we're concerned with
are transmitted via the oral-fecal route.
So we're eating other people's feces.
Not a very pleasant thought, but it is what happens.
So when those E. coli are jettisoned into the environment,
there's like this battle for survival, I'll call it.
And there's less nutrients.
It's not a very hospitable environment
and there's a lot of UV killing and desiccation of organisms.
There's variable temperature and ph,
I mean it's sort of the reason that we evolved at one point
to have microorganisms in our guts,
a very stable environment,
so they have to deal with ph changes
and changes in temperature.
And then there's predation.
There are other microorganisms that prey on bacteria
and smaller microorganisms and that leads to death.
So the E. coli survival in the environment is finite.
So depending on all these other factors,
it may survive for literally minutes
and it may survive for days or in some cases
maybe weeks or longer.
And there's much debate about how long
and in what conditions and what leads
to those survival characteristics.
And that's really important as we talk about the beaches.
But, again, the take home message here is,
E. coli is an indicator organism.
And why do we use an indicator?
Why don't we just measure the pathogens directly?
Because we have millions of organisms per gram
of your fecal material that are jettisoned
in the environment and so some are harmless.
Some can cause harm, some can be pathogens,
but the pathogens in general terms
are much more difficult to culture.
They're more fragile, they're more delicate.
So we look for these harmless organisms and we use them
to indicate the presence of the more harmful
or pathogenic organisms that would be present with it.
So we have a number of techniques that have been around
since, in fact, the early 1900s, about 1919
when these first methods for E. coli
and its relatives were developed.
And so when we look at the levels of these E. coli
we're dealing with a risk, and so what is risk?
It's really just a statistical probability that some event
is going to occur.
And so if the E. coli levels are high and you go
to the beach does that mean that you're going to get sick?
Probably not.
But, does it mean your risk is higher?
It's like crossing the road and if the traffic's
going 20 miles per hour you have a much better chance
of getting across the highway
than if the traffic's going 100 miles per hour.
So it's the same with E. coli.
The higher that number, your risk of contracting
some disease causing organism associated
with that fecal material that the E. coli came from
is much higher.
And so we call it a statistical probability
but there are no certainties.
And then there's individual immunological considerations
to take into account but there is a probability
that it's going to make you risk or make you sick.
And so when we talk about swim at your own risk,
I don't know if I'm allowed to ask questions in here,
that's maybe later for you, but, I mean,
what do people usually think about swim at your own risk?
That there's no lifeguard present, right?
It doesn't mean swim at your own risk,
you're swimming in a cesspool or septic tank.
And so we need to put this in perspective again.
Swim at your own risk really is you are risking,
you're taking that statistical probability
of something happen to you when you visit
that beach or that situation.
And we use E. coli to help us.
It's not the best indicator and those of us
that do this work understand that there's many,
many limitations.
But when that number increases,
that risk that we're assuming by going
to the beach is higher.
Again, is it imperfect? Absolutely.
Does anybody come up with a better one?
Not a chance.
People have been, since 1976 when the E. coli standards
came out by EPA, people have been talking about
there's human markers, bovine, you know, cattle.
We did a project in Sturgeon Bay where we looked at
the molecular origin of all the animal feces
in the storm drains.
We could find somebody's raccoon,
well maybe they don't have that as a pet,
cat, dog, we had a bunch of them.
We had a guinea pig, some strange DNA.
But, you know, at the end of the day these are all
different groups of organisms that are sort of transient
and passing through the population.
Is E. coli a pathogen? Another misnomer.
There's over 2000 different species or strains of E. coli.
And there's very, very few,
you could have them on a couple hands,
the number that are truly pathogenic.
Of course everyone thinks about O157:H7,
and that's the one we think about
with raw hamburger and other things.
And can that be found at a beach?
It can be. Is it exceedingly rare? Absolutely.
So again, E. coli is rarely pathogenic.
It can be, but is that indicator organism.
So then that begs the question,
what are the organisms that we're concerned with?
And sort of this is my mini bug parade from,
sort of like the Intro to Bacteriology course
or Micro course.
So salmonella, I think everybody's heard of that.
That can be transmitted by avian species,
and one of the things that we're concerned about
when we talk about water fowl and other things at the beach.
Campylobacter, so another one of those that's transmitted
and in fact you'll see sea gulls sometimes
with a digestive problem,
and you'll see little stains along the beach
and you can probably guess that they have
a campylobacter infection.
Avian botulism's a new one.
So botulinum toxin's an extremely potent toxin.
And in certain conditions, we don't see it as much today,
but if everyone remembers maybe six, seven, eight years ago,
I'm getting old so maybe more.
But when the cladophora was really bad,
those things would wash up on the shore
and what it does is it starts to grade anaerobically
which provides an environment for botulinum
or clostridium botulinum to grow and produce toxin.
And so those things can move and then all of the sudden
you're left with the toxin in the water
which is extremely toxic.
Vibrio vulnificus it's one we don't run into here too much,
but if you're in the south,
it's a pretty substantial risk to swimmers;
more of a newer or emerging pathogen.
Norovirus or any of the other viruses,
viruses are very difficult to enumerate in the environment
but some of the organisms that cause the most cases
of gastrointestinal disease.
Very difficult to culture, very expensive,
or to detect and so we don't really look for those,
but those are the things that are present
in very high numbers.
Cryptosporidium, so Wisconsin's got a lot of claims to fame,
biggest outbreak of water borne disease in Milwaukee.
Cryptosporidium was a cause of that, so it's a protozoan.
Cyanobacteria, and this is sort of, there are many others
but these are sort of the big hitters.
Cyanobacteria, some people call them blue green algae,
so if you're a microbiologist that's very insulting to them.
You don't call bacteria algae, they're a lower form of life.
But cyanobacteria, and we'll concerned with
harmful algae blooms, right, so the cyanobaterial toxins,
again Wisconsin was the first place
to have a really confirmed death from that.
So that's another emerging contaminant in the environment.
So how do we monitor for this?
Just very briefly, we collect water samples,
the standard in Wisconsin.
And you'll see our standards are a little bit different
and they were developed for a number of reasons
and you can ask questions later.
But we have a very proactive approach in this state
and we have a very different approach
than many other states, but I think it works pretty well.
So we collect samples at 12 inches,
at the middle of the beach,
or if it's a real long beach maybe multiple places.
They're put into a 100 mil water bottle,
whether you do drinking water or surface water,
all water's analyzed based on 100 mil sample volume,
so we don't record it per mil.
Does anybody really ingest a milliliter?
No, you're really ingesting a cupful or so,
and 100 mils is about a cup.
And so we place it on ice, it's returned to the lab,
we analyze them right away.
Most of the traditional techniques are cultures
so bacteria are put on some sort of media
that lets them grow and then they're cultured the next day
or they're counted the next day.
What's the problem?
You've collected a beach sample on Monday
and on Tuesday I can tell you that the water
was bad yesterday.
And so there are some problems with that.
There's actually a new method and in Door County, again,
we've been doing this for four years.
It's called qPCR, quantitative polymerase chain reaction.
And that test result's available within two hours.
And so we're using this as one of those sort of test sites.
A lot of people do this in Milwaukee or Chicago now,
they're starting to use it more.
But the problem is, as I mentioned at the beginning,
the levels of fecal contamination here are very low.
And the problems that we have at our beach,
while any problem is too many,
they're very different than you find in Milwaukee
and Chicago and other places.
So these techniques that were developed
in very urban environments need to be sort of adapted
and we need to understand them here.
And so that's one of the things that we've worked
at Crossroads here and with our county partners.
And so that holds promise.
And so why is that important?
Even in Door County if you look back where any example
of a water-borne outbreak where body contact is involved
in the transmission of that disease,
even if you collected the sample on Monday
and you got that high result on Tuesday
and you could advise people to get out
of the water on Tuesday,
you really have a 24-hour window or some number there
that people are exposed to that really high risk
and high disease probability.
And then the beach is closed and they're not in the water.
If you don't do those programs where you monitor for things,
people could be in that water for weeks before illnesses
are reported to the Health Department or local authorities
and then somebody does some investigation and tests.
And this county is a great example
where it would have been beneficial.
There was actually an outbreak the year
before the monitoring program started
or the funding was available and so it's really important.
Sometimes when nothing happens it seems boring.
Why do people keep doing this? But that's why.
When there's these unforeseen events
that's really important.
So what are the advisory?
Wisconsin is the only state in the country
that has a two-tiered advisory system.
The EPA standard is 235 and we say MPN
which is most probable number,
or it could be colony forming units.
There's a number of different values you might see
per 100 mils of water.
That's that yellow sign you see there.
That means that basically there's an elevated level
of E. coli and that translates to a risk
that swimmers should be aware of.
And you can make your own choice
of whether you want to go into the water.
The closed sign, if it goes over 1000 MPN,
then the closed sign is posted and this is universal
in all Great Lakes beaches in Wisconsin,
and in fact many inland lakes, city of Madison,
Vilas County, Oneida County, Winnebago County, Waupaca,
many of them have adopted the same standard
so there's sort of a universal signage
and standards across the state.
And are there people, I've been to the beach
and the red sign's up and somebody's like bah,
that goes up every once in a while.
It's no problem, I'm still here.
But again it's a risk.
Everybody can make their own choice.
But at least when you use the water
and it says swim at your risk,
you're making an informed decision on whether
you go into the water or not and that's your choice.
And so what are the sources of this?
We talked a little bit about it.
So this is Whitefish Dunes,
one of the more pristine and beautiful beaches,
and so it can be kids.
Wisconsin's again great because we develop little swimmers.
Where else can your kid go to the beach
and not have to go use the restroom?
But it's great but anyway.
So kids can, you know, dairy cattle
or other sort of domesticated animals.
I mean those get a lot of the press
for things in other places.
Domestic animals, so there's nothing worse
than watching somebody walk their dog down the beach
and have them, you know, do their business.
Water fowl, so there's a picture here of ducks.
It can be other things like, of course we think about geese
and sea gulls, right?
Deer, other things.
I've been told the only animal,
and I've never had this confirmed for me,
but the only warm blooded animal
that doesn't have E. coli in its gut is a beaver.
And I'm not a beaver ecologist by any means,
but beavers are very clean
and so when they release their material
it's always in the water so it's difficult.
And I've had trappers, you know, people...
I mentioned this at meeting one time and people just,
said oh really, I don't believe it, I think there must be.
But then I had people sending me all sorts
of packages in the mail.
[audience laughter]
And I think I got six Baby Ruths in Ziploc bags, but it was,
anyway, I still haven't had an actual sample.
So if anybody has one and wants to send it me,
we'd be happy to analyze it,
and I can put that one to bed.
And then of course you have other human impacts.
This is not...this actually exists.
[audience laughter]
And so there can be many things that have happened
because of human occupation that we really are unaware of.
In one case on the shores of Lake Superior
there was an example of, there's this beach that would
really have a high level of E. coli
and then it would disappear.
And then about a month later it would go through the roof
and then it would disappear.
And it turns out there was an old cabin on a little river
and grandpa or dad or whoever'd put in his own
homemade septic system,
and the kids inherited the property
when the parent passed away
and they had no idea what was going on.
Every time they would bring a group of people to the cabin,
the E. coli would go up and then, you know, anyway.
So that got fixed and so just things like that
that are artifacts of history.
But, having said that, if you look at identified sources
in the Great Lakes, most of the sources,
in this case in 2012, 40% of them are still unidentified.
So many, many of them are still unknown.
And even some of these other ones related to storm water
and wildlife are really due to sort of groups of causes,
so it's not one thing.
And the other thing is, I know a lot of people
have this conception that it's a city of Marinette,
or Menominee, or Chicago, or Milwaukee.
In almost every case, and we've published papers on this,
you don't see any fecal material coming from the outside in.
As bad as that is, us as stewards of local beaches,
it's our fault in one way or another.
Most of the things originate locally.
And if you think about just the gallons,
the sheer volume of water, it makes a lot of sense.
Even jettisoning 10 or 20 million gallons is really
a very small amount from the City of Milwaukee
to make it here and again have those E. coli survive
all the way here.
And you have to have a sense of humor.
So this is we're number one in the number two business.
I won't bore you with a lot of these,
but any time you deal with feces
you have to have a sense of humor.
My favorite one, and I was trying to get a picture of this
but I was driving a state vehicle and I
and it said, "Stay back 200 feet,"
"this truck is filled with campaign promises."
[audience laughter]
So anyway, many of them,
so I'm sure if you're a septic hauler you have to
have the same sense of humor.
So once we identify the E. coli then what do we do with it?
What can you do about it, I guess?
And this is one of the things I think maybe in my career
I've been doing this now, I've been at Oshkosh
about 16 years and I came after working
for a couple other years.
And this is one of the most rewarding
sort of projects and experiences.
We developed the sort of step-wise approach again
in this county with the help of Coastal Management
and the county partners,
where we would look at historical data,
we would do some site assessments,
we would do this what is called a sanitary survey now
but at that time nobody had any name for this.
We would do some beach redesigns and in the county
there's been about a dozen that have been redone.
There's mitigation so that design is implemented.
And then really we can talk today,
I'm going to talk a little bit about that blue investment.
What do we get back out of that investment
that we put into the beach?
And so the sanitary survey is now an EPA standard.
It was developed in the Great Lakes.
It was piloted in Wisconsin and in large part
much of the, many of the principles that were adopted
for that sanitary survey were developed in Door County.
It took us four or five or six years as all the partners
that I mentioned earlier kind of put their heads together
and came up with a way to solve these problems.
And now they've come up with a tool that has now moved
from the Great Lakes to California and Washington
and wherever on the oceans,
those coastal communities have now adopted
the sanitary surveys as well.
And in large part that was originated in Door County.
Here's a number of different factors.
I'm not going to go through all of these with you
but every microbial, but then also physical chemical data,
and at the end we just want to accurately characterize
the possible sources of contamination.
And I'll just quickly go through an example because I think
that people don't understand all work that went
into this Egg Harbor.
I'm going to use as an example and many of you have seen this.
It's probably one of the best examples of the success
of these and there's many others in the county
that went through the same process.
They just haven't been redone as long.
And so Egg Harbor, this is what the beach used to look like.
Very few people swam there.
They had this big rock jetty that also
had a physical hazard,
and so eventually that jetty was sort of removed.
Nobody seemed to know what the history of it was.
We asked many people. And it disappeared.
This is what the beach looked like,
a lot of hard infrastructure.
Again through the course of history
that served no useful purpose at the time.
Infiltration systems were installed
and so even at the end you'll see
it looks just like a beach,
it's actually an engineered waste
or storm water treatment system.
And so infiltration beds were designed.
This is the old beach on the left
and the new beach on the right.
Once those infiltration trenches were filled in,
again here's what it looks like in the ground.
We have sand and gravel and this bio-filter mix of soil
and it's not, as you know just as simple
as dumping some sand in a hole.
And this is what the beach looked like on the right,
again when we were done,
and that's what it looked like on the left beforehand.
And so one of the things that we found,
and here's the dune grass plantings
and an infiltration area where, and of course
in Egg Harbor there's a lot of topography there.
So the water gets a lot of velocity over land
when it comes through there.
So that's what those big rocks are for,
to keep it from washing out the sand
as it comes down that hill.
That all grew up and so now we have dune grass,
we have infiltration swales.
The water hit that, there's some porous pavement.
And this is what the beach looks like from my,
this is our state airplane, no I'm just kidding.
We have seen the seaplane out there,
but this is what the beach looks like now.
And so this is what it looks like from the parking lot.
This is a cord walk. So how do we get to the beach?
This is how we do it. We train people.
There's picnic areas, again throughout.
Each beach is a little different because each community
got a chance to offer input on what they wanted to do.
But at the end of the day this is what it's like.
And it's almost too many people for me,
but that's really packed.
And that's really an important feature of this,
and something that I am certainly not aware of.
As we looked at this from a public health protection
and an environmental improvement standpoint,
we didn't really consider the aesthetic improvements.
So we understand because of Wisconsin's Beach
Health website and because of the behavior of tourists
and even local citizens, they will make informed decisions
about where they take their families or where they go
on vacation based on the conditions at this beach.
And has anybody been to the Egg Harbor Beach
in the summer?
Now, I mean it is just busy all the time.
And I counted, one day we were doing some other projects,
we were going to do some more economic evaluations,
but literally over 200 people there from about 11 a.m.
to four or five o'clock when we left.
And those aren't the same people.
I mean, some might be,
but they're different people that kind of come in and go
and they're there for a few hours, bring their family.
And this picture is pretty typical of what you'd see
on that beach daily.
There's been a lot of positive feedback from that.
So, a bunch of different quotes about sparkling water,
beautiful scenery,
one of the top ten vacation destination places.
Anybody that lives here just thinks, oh yeah, duh,
why doesn't everyone come to Door County?
But it does get recognized outside of that.
A person making a comment in this particular quote
about the boardwalks or the cord walks,
there's a reason for those.
They're not just for people to get to the beach.
In many cases they're angled. And why do they do that?
It's for geese deterrent.
So geese will not go places
that they don't have line of sight.
And so those are put there to guide human behavior,
but they're really there, again, for a deterrent
of something that might deposit fecal material there.
Josh who's the former administrator there,
I think everybody now if you look at the Egg Harbor Beach
and you've got the rentals and all the other
redevelopment that's gone on there,
it's really an exciting place.
And many of the other communities are finding
the same thing with their redesigns.
Again, this just happened to be the first
that jumped in and did it.
And so you know when times are difficult financially,
people wonder well, I don't know,
we have to prioritize where we spend our money.
And when you think about it, it's a really smart investment.
I'll share a few things with you,
but the Brookings Institute did a study
where they looked at what investment
in the Great Lakes would pay off.
And everybody talks about ROI or return on investment.
And they said investing $26 billion in the Great Lakes
will result in over $80 billion in short term
and long term economic benefits.
It reinvigorates the economy regionally.
There's this direct benefit from recreation in Wisconsin.
We have over 15,000 lakes.
Minnesota is only the land of 10,000 and so it's important.
It raises property values.
And one thing that I'll mention a couple of times now
it makes regions more attractive to business and workers.
And one of the programs and the Engineering
Technology Program, they're really starved
for those people in northeast Wisconsin.
It's the largest manufacturing area in the state
and a huge part of their business
is where they locate and in terms of can they
find qualified workers and can they recruit workers to come
work in those communities because people now when they
have choices of where they're going to go and they're highly
skilled, they will go to communities where they are more
apt to raise a family and be really happy.
And so these kind of conditions are really important for them
where maybe 50-60 years ago that was not a prime consideration.
Today they are telling me, CEOs from these companies are telling
me that that is a major consideration for them.
Is my company located in a town where these opportunities
exist for my employees because that helps me
with both recruitment and retention?
And so what are some of the other economic benefits?
We improve water quality, again,
not only for healthier beaches but it's not,
I'm not a rocket scientist but it doesn't take a lot
for me to understand that this picture
before the remediation of this beach
and then the picture after is much different.
And so what does that translate into dollars?
And we hope to, again, use Door County as an example
on doing some pilots on this work.
But many other studies have looked at 45 to 60
some dollars per person per day at the beach,
that's how much they spend in the local community.
So again, picking on a town A,
if they go to the beach in that town,
they're going to stop and buy gas, get lunch,
they're going to get in the souvenir shop,
they're going to do something else in that town.
And so if you think about Door County for example,
150 visitors per day times 30 beaches times
90 beach days times $50 each,
just rough numbers, that's about $20 million.
And so what does that mean?
I mean that's a little bit,
Wisconsin tourism industry's an $18 billion industry.
Those numbers just came out again.
A significant part of that is related to water.
Door County's tourism industry, I think it just came out,
$313 million, somebody in here might know better than me.
I don't have any idea what percentage of that
is water related, but I know that if you go through
coastal communities and you talk to any business owner,
and they said, yeah, if I had 200 extra people coming
through my business over the course of a week
or whatever, that would be huge.
And when their year-round populations are 200, 400,
you know, 100 those are huge numbers.
And so the differences between businesses,
you're on a very small margin, right?
They're working for four months out of the year
or some number and so they've really gotta do everything
they can to maximize the revenue potential.
So having a family or 100 families choose community A
over community B is really important to all
of those business in those towns.
Billions are related to water and if you look at the history,
and I was going to look this up,
but I believe it's somewhere around,
the tourism industry in Wisconsin was $12 to $13 billion
a year in 2003, 2004 so roughly a decade
we've added basically 40%.
What other industries in Wisconsin have grown by 40%?
Okay, so that's a really powerful number.
It's a really big industry in the state,
and some of this may be deer hunting,
or the Wisconsin Dells and we'll talk
a little bit about that.
But what does it mean for the local community?
It's a huge asset.
So again the property values, recruitment of businesses,
and increased business, increased visitors
to all those places that we talked about before.
And so aside from that,
here's again Egg Harbor when it's done,
so a big difference between that and that.
And so one of the other things is what I will call
social equity and it's part of our history.
People are able to visit the beach regardless
of any sort of socio-economic status that they may have.
We, in my opinion, need to maintain these resources
for the larger citizenry of the state.
And so this is a key part of our history
that's really worth, aside from the economic
environmental benefits, worth preserving.
Here's one of the Dells waterparks.
You have to go to the Dells.
I don't even know what a family of four would cost,
but it's easily, the minimum even if you walked there
would be $100 just to get four wristbands
and use the outdoor waterpark.
And interestingly, another thing is in order to use
those facilities and I know there's many reasons for this,
but in very simplistic terms,
they go through a tremendous amount
of regulatory compliance to make sure that anybody
swims at those waterparks is swimming in a safe environment.
Anybody been to a waterpark where everybody
has to get out because they have an AFR?
That's an accidental fecal release.
[audience laughter]
And everybody's out of the pool.
You know that happens at, I won't mention names,
beach ABC in Door County.
Does somebody run out and say everybody out of the water?
No, you don't even know, probably.
It just floats by you.
But there are no requirements for beaches.
So anybody that goes to the beach goes there
with sort of this understanding that they're swimming
in an area, and I think in most cases as I showed,
it is very clean.
But anybody can visit this beach and they can partake
in the natural resources.
And one of the things I hear many ,many times,
I've heard many stories from people from my age to younger
to people much older than my parents
and they tell me that I remember living on the lake.
I remember living on the shoreline
and I just couldn't afford it anymore.
All my neighbors came in from wherever they came in
and they built million dollars homes
and I can't afford it anymore.
And so I had to sell it or my parents had to sell it.
So they weren't able to afford the things
that their families had had for years and years.
But I can still go to the beach.
I go to the local beach down the street
and I get to enjoy that the same as I did as a child.
So some conclusions, they've taking this proactive approach.
I think Door County was very insightful in that
it understood the importance of the beaches
to not only the economy, the culture,
the lives of not only the citizens of the county
but the visitors that come here and enjoy
all the great things we see in Door County.
And really the things that you see here,
whether it's the sanitary surveys,
whether it's many of the other projects
that have went on here,
things that my group or other people
in the county have done, it's really a national leader.
And all those redesigns that have
been done in Door County,
there is nobody else that has done that many.
This is by far the most.
The process that we adopted here is now being used
in Michigan, throughout the Great Lakes,
other places all over Wisconsin, but it all started here.
And that's really a thing I think to be proud of.
There's a lot of great beach researchers in this area,
Milwaukee, Racine, but a lot of great things have originated
in Wisconsin and a lot of those in Wisconsin
in Door County that have now been passed on nationally
and people have kind of picked up on those.
Our beaches are in great shape so again,
the sky's not falling.
The water's in really good shape.
Can it always be better? Absolutely.
But I'd rather try and keep the beach open
that .7% of the time than work on another beach
that I won't mention south of here that might be closed
a significantly more amount of time.
And I think beaches are one of these things that provide us
this unique example of how we can really balance.
And we get benefits for both environmental, public health,
social and economic benefits all in one project.
So we don't have to choose are we going to do
the socially right thing or are we going to do
the environmentally right thing or the economically right thing.
In the case of beaches you get all of those things
if it's done right in a single project.
So, fabulous example of how you can get a win-win, win-win.
I don't know how many things I listed, but a lot of wins.
With that I'll say thank you
and take any questions that you might have.
[applause]