The Pine Creek Watershed Assessment Project by Sue Broughton

Sue Broughton is the president of the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh. Broughton talked about the collaboration involved in the Pine Creek Watershed Assessment project, which highlighted the League of Women Voters’ positions on multi-municipal planning and cooperation, improving water quality management, and encouraging active citizen participation in government. Broughton explained that the water management policies upstream affect those municipalities that are downstream in a watershed, and said that if form follows function, than streams would be best managed on a watershed basis. However, most watersheds include portions of several municipalities, making management more difficult. The Pine Creek Watershed includes parts of 14 municipalities. They applied for a Growing Greener Grant and received about one third of the amount requested. Broughton says that receiving only one third of the funding requested was a good thing because it resulted in public participation and municipal cooperation, raising the level of community awareness. The Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement (EASI) were trained to do stream sampling and monitoring. They trained additional people to conduct stream sampling and monitoring, resulting in a citizen volunteer effort that saved money and produced results such as a Watershed Protection Inventory Survey that was distributed to the municipalities, where 13 out of 14 completed it. The steering committee of representatives from the municipalities such as engineers, the two sponsoring organizations, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, the North Area Environmental Council, and citizen groups is now attempting to apply the cooperative techniques used in this project to other mutual efforts.