By Tim Wacker
Staff Writer Lawrence Tribune
Environmental activists are mourning the loss of a popular river protection program — a quiet casualty of Gov. Mitt Romney's budget-cutting plan. They say the Massachusetts Watershed Initiative's demise will hinder or halt dozens of projects they are working on. The program was launched five years ago to organize and assist the efforts of a hodge-podge of private environmental groups dedicated to cleaning up and protecting the state's rivers.
Dozens of state environmental employees assigned to the program eventually made themselves indispensable to those groups, which must again fend for themselves.
"It was a great loss," said Mike Davis, a drinking-water advocate with the Clean Water Fund, a national organization with a base in Boston. "They were a great group of people. They were not kids out of college. They had extensive experience in their fields. They had innovative ways to reach out to people to get them involved in these watersheds."
The Watershed Initiative got the unofficial word of its demise in January, and the axe formally fell Friday. Most of the state Department of Environmental Protection employees who were assigned to the program were reassigned to their previous jobs, EOEA spokeswoman Katie Cahill said.
"Fundamentally, it didn't make sense to have them in these separate agencies," Cahill said of the DEP staff assigned to the watershed program. "When you form a separate agency you are inherently going to create overlap."
It is not the program that is missed so much as the people involved in it, said the heads of three private watershed groups. The watershed protection program was divided into 27 teams that coordinated local preservation efforts for 27 watersheds throughout the state.
William Dunn, leader of the Merrimack Watershed Team, was an invaluable resource, said Lowell lawyer Matthew Donahue, president of the Merrimack River Watershed Council, a private group in .Lowell concerned with the Merrimack. Dunn helped local environmental groups secure state grants that are their lifeblood. Dunn also helped bring together different private environmental groups who work toward similar goals but not with each other.
"They've eliminated a network that we relied on very heavily," Donahue said. "May it rest in peace. Maybe it's resting in pieces." It is. Scattered across the state are dozens of plans and proposals from the watershed program's 27 teams. Those plans will have to be sifted in the coming months to see what will be funded and what won't, Cahill said.
