Protecting the Saugatuck River watershed

1. The Saugatuck River starts in the small streams and wetlands of northern Fairfield County. By the time it reaches Redding, it's a sun-and-shaded waterway that first fills the Saugatuck River, then heads south to feed into Long Island Sound. Its path takes it through one of the most populated areas of the county. At nearly every step of its way, and that of its tributaries, there are dams or remnants of dams, reflecting the small-mill industrial history of the region.
2. For all that, the river is clean, the center of a greenway that runs through the center of the crowded county. "It's a Class A river and we want it to continue that way, forever and ever and ever,'' Weston First Selectman Woody Bliss said Wednesday. To make that pledge stand up, leaders from the 11 towns in the river's watershed signed a compact in Weston last week that commits them to protect the river's watershed. Those towns include Bethel, Danbury, Newtown, Ridgefield, Redding and Wilton.
3. The state chapter of The Nature Conservancy organized the partnership, basing it on organizations that already protect several other state streams, including the Norwalk River. It is not a regulatory body. But it does commit the 11 towns to protect the quality of Saugatuck River water by employing good land use practices and by educating the public about how chemicals they put on their lawns can end up in the river.
4. Lisa Hammers, director of the state chapter of The Nature Conservancy said this approach "is the right way to do this.'' The conservancy already owns the 1,700-acre Devil's Den Preserve in Redding and Weston and the 1,000-acre Trout Brook Valley in Weston and Easton. It played an instrumental part in 2001 to help preserve more than 15,000 acres of water company land owned by the Kelda Group — about a third of that around the Saugatuck Reservoir. And it has named the area around the reservoir, the 15,000-acre Saugatuck Forest, one of the state's Last Great Places.
5. But the entire Saugatuck River watershed is 57,264 acres. Hammers said it's totally impractical to think all that land can be preserved, especially in densely populated Fairfield County. "You have to think of the scale of the way this river works, then get the towns to work together,'' she said.
6. Chris Malik, coordinator of southwestern coastal wetlands for the state Department of Environmental Protection, also said that in a state where there are 169 separate town governments, forging partnerships like this is vital. "We don't have county or regional government to bring towns together,'' he said. Because of septic system failure, overuse of lawn fertilizer and poor property management, some small streams that flow into the Saugatuck are beginning to show stress.
7. In the last section of the river — below the spot where the Saugatuck, its west branch and the Aspetuck River meet — there can be high bacteria counts, especially during summer months. But on the whole, the river system is healthy, especially in its northern reaches.
8. Chris Malik said the 11 towns are forming the Saugatuck partnership at a good time — while the river is largely running clean. "I drive through here and I'm amazed at the natural beauty and how it's been protected,'' he said. "I've spent a lot of my time working on things like wetland mitigation and I've learned the best way to spend money is on preservation, not mitigation.''
9. Newtown First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal said the 2001 fight to preserve the Kelda land taught towns the value of working together on watershed issues. He said there's a growing awareness on the part of many citizens that what happens in one town, and one stream, affects another. "The headwaters are in Newtown,'' he said, "but it all flows to the Sound.'' "If we participate, everyone benefits,'' said Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton. Redding First Selectman Natalie Ketcham said that 90 percent of her town provides watershed land to either the Saugatuck River or its main tributary, the Aspetuck River. So the town knows the importance of making sure the rivers stay clean.
10. The problems of the Saugatuck involve its history in the 18th and 19th century, when it was lined with small mills and factories. The Saugatuck and its tributaries have about 100 small dams that are the remnants of those days.
11. In an ideal world, where money was no object, the state would remove many of these outdated dams, but this work is expensive. Many people have grown up watching the river cascade over the old dams and consider them part of the landscape. Instead, the Conservancy has gained permission to alter three dams to allow migrating alewives and river herring — small fish vital to the river's ecological health — to swim upstream.
12. It now has plans in 2006 to do the same to a fourth dam, clearing a way for the fish to migrate from the Sound into Weston. "This a very heavily dammed river,'' Harold said. "So we have to take lots of little steps.''Having the commitment of the 11 towns in the partnership, she said, will help gather support and grant money for those little steps.[ORG PUB NEWSTIMESLIVE.COM WRITTEN BY Robert Mille]