Business View Magazine | October 2020

260 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2020 high-capacity well-users are using water and that they may be having a negative impact on the environment. Case in point: there’s a river that flows through the Village of Plover, the Little Plover River, with an enpoundment called Springville Pond. It’s a beautiful water resource, but at its eastern end, at the beginning of the river, in 2004-05, there were some small dry-ups in the stream, and environmentalists became concerned that the Village and the agriculture industry’s wells were drying up the river. “So, the Village changed its pumping regimen; we have three municipal wells in the Village – two are within one-half mile of the river. We now pump 70 percent of the water from the third well, which is over two miles away, and 30 percent of the water, that is only one-half mile away, to minimize impacts to the river. The Village also acquired some listening equipment and has done a lot of leak detection. In this past year, we’ve found significant leaks in some of the water laterals. We’ve fixed those leaks, which has resulted in substantial reduction in the amount of water that the Village pumps from its wells, lowering pumping by 110 million gallons per year.” And, once again, the Village has worked with partners on other environmental issues. “The Del Monte Corporation has facilities in the Village, and they worked with us to acquire 160 acres of land,” Mahoney reports. “Del Monte took it out of agriculture production and now use it for taking their process water and cooling water and putting it back on the land. So, that became a positive aspect. We also started conversations with some of the conservation groups and with an engineering consulting firm that specializes in groundwater and natural resource issues. They asked us: ‘Did you ever consider looking, not just at the Little Plover River, but at the entire watershed? What does the water quantity and quality look like? Are there improvements that can be made to the stream? What about forest management? What about plants? What about the animals?’ Well, that was an ‘aha’ moment for