Digester meeting adjourned due to overflow crowd
By James Card
The Dec. 4 public hearing in the town of Lind concerning construction of a digester on the Brooks Dairy Farm never got started.
The meeting was formally adjourned because all of the people who arrived could not fit in the 1942 brick schoolhouse that now serves as the town hall.
Town officials anticipated a crowd and they cordoned off a section of a nearby cornfield for more parking, along with setting up a portable generator with floodlights to illuminate the ad hoc parking lot. Cones were set out to guide traffic and pedestrians.
The proposed digester is a facility that would be located on the Brooks Farm. It would use manure and food waste to make natural gas.
The meeting was set to start by 5 p.m. but at 4:30 p.m. there was already a long line of people waiting for the town hall to be opened. Some people in line wore black-and-blue baseball caps with the words “No Digester” on the front.
The main meeting room filled up until not a single metal folding chair was left. People kept coming in and stood shoulder-to-shoulder.
“I call this meeting to order. Due to the size of the crowd, I make a motion to adjourn this meeting. This will be rescheduled for a much larger venue and that notice will be posted accordingly to state statues,” said Chair Kathy Nickel, amidst some grumbling from the audience.
As that decision was made, more people were pouring into the building as those seated got up to leave. Town Clerk Faye Neumann stood at the door with the sign-in sheets. She had a rough estimation that 126 people attended, not counting those who entered through the handicap accessible door and those that signed in on one line as husband and wife.
Concerns over groundwater
In the parking lot was Anna Kufahl. She had handwritten signs displayed on the tailgate of her red pickup along with two cases of bottled water. One of them read: “Free bottled water. Get used to the taste of not fresh plastic tasting bottled water! If this anerobic [sic] digester goes in, miles from here; our artesian well in jeopardy!”
She pointed over to the spring. Near the town hall is a cast iron hand pump tapped into a historic artesian well. The water is long-known to be clean and refreshing.
“People come from all over to get that water. Farmington, Dayton, Waupaca, from everywhere,” she said.
A group called Citizens Protecting Rural Waupaca County distributed a flyer listing many of the harmful impacts a digester could have in the area. One of them was, “Potential for neighboring wells to be contaminated should a spill occur.”
Brooks Dairy Farm produced a two-page fact sheet addressing all of those concerns and listed the benefits of having a digester.
One of the points was, “Land application of raw manure can be a source of non-point pollution – Brooks Farms will eliminate the risk of run-off of raw manure from fields.”
Non-point pollution, also known as “run-off,” is defined by the Environmental Protection Agency as “caused by rainfall or snowmelt moving over and through the ground. As the runoff moves, it picks up and carries away natural and human-made pollutants, finally depositing them into lakes, rivers, wetlands, coastal waters and ground waters.”
Both Brooks Dairy Farm and the Citizens Protecting Rural Waupaca County have valid arguments and counterarguments for a digester in the town of Lind.
However, the debate and discussion must wait for another time. When Nickel adjourned the meeting she said the to-be-determined time, date and location for next meeting would be publically posted for 30 days. One possible venue could be the large basement room in the Waupaca County Courthouse as it was a forum for a large turnout of residents protesting a proposed sand mine on property owned by the Iola Old Car Show.