June 29, 2026
By Tim Hundt
VERNON COUNTY, Wis. — The Vernon County Flood Mitigation Alliance is sharpening its focus on what comes after flood control dams come out of local valleys and how to prove that investments in land conservation and other measures will pay off for taxpayers and landowners alike.
Formed as an advisory group under the county Conservation and Education Committee, the Alliance brings together county staff, township officials, watershed councils and conservation advocates. Its purpose is to coordinate flood planning, guide conservation spending and connect university partners with on-the-ground projects across watersheds in Vernon County.
Much of the recent meeting centered on the transition away from federal PL 566 flood control dams and how the county can replace their limited protection with conservation practices, data and new funding partnerships.
As we previously reported. La Crosse, Monroe and Vernon Counties have all signed off on a plan to decommission or remove all of the earthen flood control dams in the Coon Creek and West Fork Kickapoo watersheds following a multi-year, multi-million dollar federal study that showed they were more costly than the damage they were preventing. You can read about that decision in our previous story here.
Summary of UniverCity and county partnership
Land and Water Conservation Department conservationist David Hettenbach outlined how the Alliance has been working with the University of Wisconsin UniverCity and University Alliance program to build a long-term outreach and planning effort.
This past spring, a UW team produced a roughly 15-page Sustainability and Conservation Outreach Plan that calls for a countywide public survey, targeted messaging to different landowner groups and a sustained communications campaign about flood resilience and conservation options.
Hettenbach told the Alliance he plans to relaunch the survey under county ownership and push it out through mailings, social media, watershed meetings and in-person events such as music in the parks.
“My hope is we could at least get that kind of low-hanging fruit,” Hettenbach said of farmers already involved in conservation projects. “Hey, we are here, funding this project at your farm, would you be willing to fill out the survey.”
Committee Chair Wayde Lawler pressed for incentives and broader outreach, suggesting local businesses or farm suppliers might sponsor small prizes to boost participation and that public events could become regular venues for flood messaging.
“I was also thinking about events like music in the parks, where just a lot of people come together,” Lawler said, adding that survey responses would be most robust when the effort is first announced.
UniverCity’s next step is expected to be a fall semester journalism and strategic communications course that would develop a full media campaign around flood resilience and land use, likely focused first on agricultural landowners because of the potential impact of farm conservation practices.
“These are typically senior students,” Hettenbach said. “They would work on generating some content for this messaging campaign. We put this survey out, we get some feedback back from the survey. At the same time in the fall, this group is working on creating content. Now we can kind of run a campaign based on what the survey results are.”
Alliance members described the University Alliance relationship as unusually productive for a rural county, noting that earlier projects produced a river gauge, a runoff monitoring sensor and a new highway decision-making tool with relatively small county contributions.
“How long has the committee been involved with these folks,” Dave Eggen asked.
“University Alliance, the first one we did was this past spring, so six months, and it went well,” Hettenbach said. “They delivered on what they said they were going to do.”
How the FEMA BRIC grant fits into county mitigation work
Alliance members linked the UniverCity projects to an earlier and much larger stream of mitigation work funded through a federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant that Vernon County received several years ago through FEMA.
That grant, shepherded by former Land Informaiton Officer Doug Avoles and local partners, was aimed at getting ahead of flood damage by improving data, emergency reporting and field-scale conservation planning across the county. The project grew directly out of early conversations among departments that later formalized into the Flood Mitigation Alliance.
Current Land Information Officer and Alliance member Monique Hassman described the effort as a three-pronged approach that pulled together Land and Water, Land Information and Emergency Management to better understand where floods hit, how often they repeat and where conservation on the land would do the most good.
“One of the initiative was to look at historic data, working with Brandon’s (Larson) and emergency management data from FEMA, mapping out where there was damage, flood damage in a county, not only spatially where the impacts were, but temporally, and then be able to state repetitive damage, which is helpful for grant applications,” Hassman said.
A second piece of the BRIC-funded work was a new system for capturing real-time reports from residents during flood events so the county would not lose that information once it disappeared into state and federal archives.
“At the time when it was being sent to Wisconsin Emergency Management, it was being archived and we could not get access to it afterward, which might help for us,” Hassman said. “So we were going to develop our own program, so that we could collect and archive that data.”
The third and most technically ambitious piece focused on modeling where conservation practices would have the most impact. Using federal BRIC dollars, the county requested a high-resolution digital elevation model that could drive the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework tool, not just for two pilot watersheds but for the entire county and a buffer area.
“What came out of it is a pretty exciting project that Samer (Kharbush with Vernon County Land Water) worked on, requesting the digital elevation model, not just being for the two watersheds, but we requested it for the entire county, including the buffer, so that that modeling tool could be run for all of the watersheds in Vernon County,” Hassman said. “So that was a huge feat.”
She said the tool allows the county to move away from general notions of where conservation might help and instead pinpoint specific farm fields, waterways and hillslopes where practices will generate the biggest reductions in runoff, sediment and phosphorus.
“This ACPF tool looks at site-specific, and so that is pretty exciting,” Hassman said. “So you can get your most bang for your buck when you are doing your outreach to work with landowners about, hey, this is what the model says, this is what you see on the ground, does this make sense, are you interested in implementing this.”
Hassman emphasized that the BRIC project was one of the first tangible outcomes of county departments sitting down together to treat flooding as a shared problem rather than something piecemealed by road crews, conservation staff or emergency managers.
“It was part of the flood planning that came out of Flood Mitigation Alliance efforts, where we were not coming together as departments talking about, hey, flooding is impacting all of our departments, but not one department is charged with dealing with it,” Hassman said. “This was a project that came out of, hey, what does everybody need here, how do we apply for that, and then strategically implement it.
Dams headed for decommissioning
The meeting repeatedly returned to the future of the county’s 21 PL-566 dams, particularly structures in the Coon Creek and West Fork watersheds that the federal government has already slated for decommissioning.
Hettenbach reported that NRCS has secured funding for design work on dam removal and has hired an engineering firm that has begun core drilling and field visits at sites including Jersey Valley, Klinkner and Mills.
“The intention last time I heard from Steve (Becker with NRCS) was for Aug. 1 for the performance period to start,” Hettenbach said. “It would be an 18-month performance period, so we’d be looking at about February of 2028. We would then have designs for the decommissioning.”
Under federal rules, NRCS will take the Jersey Valley project to roughly 30 percent design, then calculate the cost of a full rebuild and compare it to estimated recreational and economic benefits. At that point, the federal government could agree to pay for dam removal but not for reconstruction, leaving Vernon County to decide whether to shoulder any rebuilding costs.
“Jersey would be the big one,” Hettenbach said. “If that cost is over a certain dollar value, the federal government will pay for the decommissioning of Jersey, but they would not pay to rebuild it. My guess is they would come to the county and offer them the opportunity of, ‘Here’s what we’re willing to put in, here’s what the cost estimate is. Does the county want to shoulder that cost.’”
Alliance member and watershed organizer Eric Weninger pressed for clarity on what federal law and cost-benefit rules actually allow, warning that local officials cannot wait until designs are finished to start planning options for each structure.
“Inevitably, we’re going to have to have these conversations about every single dam in the county,” Weninger said. “The federal government is not doing watershed planning, they’re not giving us really any options other than ‘get them out of here.’”
What happens after dams are gone
Several speakers stressed that taking out dams will not simply return watersheds to some benign pre-dam condition. Instead, the Alliance is trying to anticipate faster flows, more erosion and new liability concerns if conservation practices and road designs do not keep up.
Dave Eggen, a town official who now sits on the Alliance and represents seven dams in his district, said his constituents see green grass on the face of earthen dams and water still standing in pools and wonder why anything needs to change.
“People say, ‘What in the world, they look great, they’re holding back water, and they’re still doing their job,’” Eggen said. “I have to agree with them. That’s why it’s important that I learn some things here on this committee.”
Eggen connected the current moment to family history in Timber Coulee. His grandfather started farming below what is now the Snowflake ski jump more than a century ago but eventually had to abandon the bottomland after repeated spring floods covered fields with logs and debris.
“He built a new house that still stands there today and crawled up on the ridge,” Eggen said. “Nobody raised row crops in that valley until the dams went in. After the dams went in, everybody said corn and beans along the road. It’s the fact that if they’ve outlived their lives, we’re going to go back to 1959 basically, unless we can come up with a really good idea here.”
Weninger argued that the real value of the PL-566 system was never just the concrete and earthworks, but the conservation practices required on half of the land draining into each structure. He cited a 1990s study showing that while the dams cut peak flow in Coon Valley by roughly 10 percent during a 50-year storm, upland conservation cut peak flows by about 50 percent.
“The flood benefit was coming from the conservation, the resilience, and how much money did it cost to get the conservation practices in versus the ongoing maintenance and dredging with the dams that have geotechnical vulnerabilities,” Weninger said.
He warned that the county has not maintained the level of conservation spelled out in its original agreements.
“The county signed documents saying that they would maintain effective practices in 50 percent of the watershed, and that’s not happening,” Weninger said. “There’s potentially some liability there too.”
Costs and gaps in floodplain remapping
County land information staffer Matthew Albright told the Alliance that federal promises around floodplain mapping have already fallen short of early expectations.
Early in the PL-566 environmental review, officials were told money would be available to update floodplain maps and Letters of Map Amendment once dams were removed or reclassified. Albright said that has changed.
“I just wanted to say that, you know, initially when all the meetings were going on, they were talking about setting aside money for floodplain remapping, and I was just kind of disappointed when they came out and said that the LOMAs (Letter of Map Revision) are going to be on us,” Albright said. “That is potentially about $50,000 on the county and somewhere around 1,000 hours of staff time. I was just kind of disappointed that the federal government did not stand behind their initial promise.”
Federal agencies will pay for the hydraulic and hydrologic modeling, Albright said, but not for the actual remapping work that residents and developers rely on when siting homes, bridges and other structures.
Planner and Alliance member Monique Hassman said outdated maps undermine both public safety and data integrity.
“The data that we have on our website that determines building opportunities that folks have with the land, they are mapped in a particular way, and things have changed,” Hassman said. “Making sure that we are providing accurate updated data, and knowing we are not, does not settle well for anyone that uses those maps.”
Lawler acknowledged that the county will likely have to absorb the mapping expense despite the lack of federal follow-through.
“For that reason, it is not something we are going to just sit on,” Lawler said. “We are going to have to do the remapping. We cannot in good faith not do it.”
Pushing for more investment and a measurable return
Alliance members devoted a lengthy portion of the meeting to a larger question. If Vernon County is expected to live with more intense rain and less federal structural protection, how can it justify higher local investment in watershed conservation, mapping and planning, and how can that investment be shown to pay off.
Weninger said federal reimbursements and damages already tell part of the story. Citing county reports, he said Vernon County has received more than $1 million in FEMA funding over about a decade for flood damage, and that figure does not capture private losses or the mental toll of repeated disasters.
“I do not believe the premise that we do not have the money, so we are not going to make a plan,” Weninger said. “There is a real cost that the county bears. The scale of our floods is not that big relative to what happens in Milwaukee or in hurricanes. The county is going to probably bear some of that cost.”
He argued that the Alliance has a responsibility to quantify avoided costs and return on investment, not just advocate for more general conservation work.
“At the end of the day, budgets are what is driving decisions,” Weninger said. “If you can show that there is a return on an investment, that every dollar spent in prevention reduces actual dollars the county has to spend, that is the conversation we need to have.”
Hassman backed that push, recalling earlier county work with Grasslands 2.0 and and other conservation organizations that produced an infographic linking farm conservation spending to reduced road and bridge damage.
“It came out of the background of once we were able to find the impact of damage on the ground, what are those costs versus if we are investing in land managers and infiltration,” Hassman said. “You have a graphic, and you made it tangible for people. At the county, there was a time earlier when we were trying to make the connection of why are we investing in watershed councils, why are we investing in farms, and how does that connect to infrastructure.”
She called for new work with university economists and planners to update that type of analysis for today’s storms and land use.
A small but targeted budget request
In the end, the Alliance voted to ask the Conservation, Education and Economic Development Committee and the Land and Water Department to seek a $5,000 allocation in the next county budget for a University Alliance project focused on the economics of flood mitigation.
Hassman framed the motion as seed money to quantify avoided costs from land use and infrastructure changes and to craft messages that resonate with finance staff, grantmakers and residents.
“I think it is an admirable initiative to make a request at a university that has access to transdisciplinary folk that can attend to such a request,” Hassman said. “If we can work with folks at university on attempting to quantify some of this, I think that would be really helpful for us in making decisions going forward.”
Eggen seconded the idea of grounding local debates in concrete numbers from a familiar example. He pointed to his own farm, which drains into two dams and already includes a two-mile-long grass waterway along a county road.
“Take my farm as an example,” Eggen said. “I flow into two dams. I have a two-mile-long grass waterway. So we take out the dam down there. What are we going to do on my farm that is going to have an impact on that flood control?”
Lawler said the request is modest compared with the scale of recent flood damages and current conservation demand and could be paired later with Ho-Chunk Nation watershed funding.
“We would vote on it now, and then it would be part of the budget conversation,” Lawler said, adding that a separate Ho-Chunk application window later in the year could provide a backup if levy funds are tight.
Looking ahead
The Alliance plans to meet again in late October, by which time NRCS design work on dam decommissioning is expected to be underway and the UniverCity survey effort should be in the field.
Hassman said that even as technical questions dominate, the committee needs to keep a clear eye on residents who live with both the benefits and risks of dams and conservation programs.
“Social demographics are really important for the campaigning that we do and the communities we work with,” Hassman said. “These landowners in particular did not know that there was flexibility in drafting leases or what kind of flexibility they had, so being trained and having a cohort to get together was a real successful model. If we are in the spirit of doing surveys, social science could be helpful for readers to understand what is at stake.”
For now, Alliance members say they will keep trying to turn years of reports and personal flood stories into a clear case for prevention that can be understood in both emotional and financial terms.
“We should not be expected to do this all at this table,” Weninger said. “But if we can show that every $1 spent on mitigation saves $6 or $7 in future damage, that gives you more money to do something else. That is the minimum of what we should be doing here.”
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