Member Highlight: Butternut Valley Alliance
For this Member Highlight, the Coalition’s New York State Lead, Amy Wyant, interviews Ed Lentz, Chairperson of the Board of Directors with Butternut Valley Alliance (BVA). Their edited conversation follows.
What is the Butternut Valley Alliance’s mission?
Our mission is to encourage the Butternut Creek Watershed to become an even better place to live, work, and play. Our activities include connecting communities, protecting the environment, and promoting the arts. With respect to our vision, BVA is leading the Butternut Creek Watershed towards a sustainable future. We do this through various community events, work projects, and programs that promote environmental stewardship, the arts, history, and economic development, including agriculture. Our expansive mission has been an advantage to us in many ways, because it allows us to connect with more people than we otherwise might be able to attract, bringing everybody together to forward our mission and connecting the community.
Where are you located, and where does your organization do its work?
Our geographic area of interest is the Butternut Valley, New York along the 37-mile-long Butternut Creek. We don't actually have headquarters because we are an all-volunteer organization. The physical center of the valley is Morris, New York, where we maintain a mailbox and have our meetings.
What are some of your current projects you are most excited about?
One is the Channel Creek Restoration in Morris that we're doing with Upper Susquehanna Coalition (USC), another NY Choose Clean Water Coalition member. USC is taking the lead, but we're helping them where we can. The resources and expertise the USC is providing is extremely helpful to our organization because we're so limited in capacity. We tend to do a lot of our work by partnering or aligning ourselves with groups like USC and the Otsego County Conservation Association and others.
The hottest thing we're working on now relates to the departure of the local bank. Community Bank closed the branch about two months ago and we've been working hard to find a banking entity to take their place. It’s a complicated project that includes purchase of the building and outreach to attract a bank or credit union. We're also trying to establish a portion of the Butternut Creek Valley as a banking development district to provide certain incentives for banks to come in and establish a branch, because Morris is a state definition of a banking desert.
What issue area do you hope to focus on in the future and how is it relevant for clean water restoration?
Organizationally, we need to stabilize our infrastructure. We're a bunch of well-meaning, well-intended volunteers who work hard. But we don't have a stable, sustainable infrastructure, so we need to work on building that that. We want to start with a full-time executive director. Our policies, procedures, fundraising and board development could also be improved. We also want to find funding for a Watershed Coordinator to put the 2019 Watershed Management plan into action.
We also would like to work on some connected walking trails at the Texas Schoolhouse State Forest.
I think all these things can help benefit water quality directly, like with the stream bank stabilization projects and riparian buffers that are part of the watershed plan. They can also benefit water quality indirectly through opening the outdoors to people and showing the value of the natural resources that we have.
What have you gained as being part of the Choose Clean Water Coalition?
Being part of the Choose Clean Water Coalition gives us a voice and has allowed us to become better known in the broader Chesapeake community.
