1000 friends of wisconsin promotes and advocates beneficial land, water, and air that shape healthy communities where people want to live, work, and play. Our work focuses on the helping communities make the connection between our everyday land use and transportation decisions.

Environment

We continued our work making the link between good land use policies and clean water through our work with several communities in the milwaukee area. We are undertaking a review of the codes and ordinances of ten communities to determine whether any of those codes and ordinances could be improved to allow greater use of green infrastructure to control polluted runoff into nearby rivers and lakes. The year and a half long project is nearing the midway point with strong support from participating municipalities. Several other municipalities in the area have expressed interest in participating in a similar review when this project is completed. we continued our work towards improving communities by supporting policies that give residents more choice in the mode of travel. Specifically we promoted funding measures for transit and fought efforts to cut transit support at the state level. While transit did suffer setbacks in the last biennial budget (repeal of regional transit authority legislation and a 10% cut in state aids) we worked with others to stave off a proposal that would have cut all segregated transportation fund support for transit virtually assuring the death of transit in wisconsin. We also worked to stop senseless spending on road projects that provide no benefits. We sued the wisconsin department of transportation (dot) to stop highway 23, arguing that they had conducted improper hearings, performed an inadequate review of the project in their environmental impact statement and underestimated the amount of damage done to wetlands and farmland. Rather than go to trial, the dot agreed to address all of our claims in a new, complete review of the project. the green tier legacy community charter was kicked off in december 2010. In 2011, we worked with the five charter member communities (appleton, bayfield, fitchburg, middleton, and the village of weston) to begin implementation. We held quarterly meetings with invited speakers and presentations, we established a website (greentiercommunties. Org) and formed an executive committee to develop the structure for the sustainability program. Recruitment efforts for new communities paid dividends in 2012 adding monona, bayside, eau claire, and la crosse. We have an intern who has continued to gather information from the cities and upgrade the website. In 2013 we added the communities of ashland and sheboygan.