Pootatuck Watershed Association Outlines Its Goals

By Andrew Gorosko

A new environmental organization, which aims to protect the Pootatuck River Watershed, has formulated a mission statement describing its specific goals.

Members of the Pootatuck Watershed Association (PWA) this week endorsed the document that explains how the nascent group will proceed, said James Belden, who heads the association’s steering committee.

The organization plans to incorporate as a private, nonprofit group by February, he said. The group plans to stress the importance of watershed management.

Potatuck Club members last April announced the formation of the group. The Potatuck Club is a private fish-and-game club that owns about 250 acres of undeveloped land lying in a corridor on either side of the Pootatuck River, in an undeveloped area situated between Wasserman Way and South Main Street. (The club, which formed in 1888, adopted the archaic spelling of the river’s name, Potatuck.)

The PWA has formed an eight-member steering committee, whose members will likely assume posts on a planned board of directors, said Mr Belden. The steering committee is comprised of representatives of four groups: The Potatuck Club, the Candlewood Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited, the Town of Newtown, and the Newtown Forest Association. Individual steering committee members are Pat Barkman, Sally O’Neil, and George Benson.

Mr Belden said, “Clean, cold and plentiful water is necessary for our thriving community to survive. It is the center of our domestic, commercial, agrarian, and recreational needs, and each one of us has an impact on it.”

Mr Belden added, “We all live within the hydrologic cycle, and any disruptions in this cycle impacts the availability of clean, cold water in the future, which supports the basic life needs of humans and the flora and fauna that share our world.”

 

PWA Tenets

The PWA’s mission statement calls for the group to work to:

¬Protect and preserve the Pootatuck River, its drainage basin, and its underlying aquifer, collectively known as the “watershed,” as a recreational resource and as a source of safe, clean drinking water for the benefit of the people of Newtown now and for generations to come.

¬Promote the reasonable and prudent use and consumption of water from the watershed to assure its availability for future generations.

¬Protect, preserve and enhance the environmental health of land in the watershed to safeguard the water supply and provide suitable habitat for wild flora, fauna, and aquatic life.

¬Encourage and promote land use and development plans and practices in the watershed and in adjacent areas that will further the above goals.

¬Conduct research and collect data and information regarding the watershed and its components.

¬Educate the public, especially students, regarding the watershed, its importance and value, its state, capacity and condition, and relevant threats, risks, and opportunities.

 

Organization

After incorporating, the PWA will start a membership and fundraising drive for its activities, Mr Belden said. Various types of memberships will be offered, he said.

The group also plans to publish a brochure to publicize its activities, he said, and would function like a small version of the Housatonic Valley Association (HVA).

The HVA, which was founded in 1941, is a private, nonprofit group that works to protect the natural character and environmental health of communities in the 1,948-square-mile, tri-state Housatonic River Watershed. The 150-mile-long Housatonic River watershed extends southward from the Berkshires in Massachusetts to Long Island Sound.

Unlike the HVA, which functions in an area holding 83 municipalities, the Pootatuck Watershed is almost entirely located in Newtown, Mr Belden noted. A small section of the watershed is in Monroe. The 26-square-mile Pootatuck River Watershed lies within the larger Housatonic River Watershed.

The Pootatuck Watershed Association was initially conceived as the Pootatuck Aquifer and Watershed Conservation Association. It later temporarily became known as the Pootatuck River Conservation Association.

 

Pootatuck Domain

The Pootatuck River Watershed collects rainwater falling across a broad swath of central Newtown, channeling that drainage both eastward and westward, and then eventually northward into the main trunk of the Pootatuck River near Sandy Hook Center.

The combined flow of the river system is detained in two old millponds behind dams in Rocky Glen. The northward-flowing river then deposits its water and its sediment load at a delta at its confluence with the larger Housatonic River, near Silver Bridge.

The Pootatuck River’s watershed covers approximately 40 percent of the town’s 60-square-mile area. The watershed’s easternmost point lies near the intersection of Route 34 and Gray’s Plain Road. The watershed’s westernmost point lies near the intersection of Birch Hill Road and Cannon Drive.

Within the roughly diamond-shaped watershed lies the Pootatuck aquifer, the subterranean source of two public water supplies, one of which supplies United Water’s central public water supply, and the other which provides drinking water for Fairfield Hills and adjacent properties.

Besides the dozens of brooks and streams that channel water through the Pootatuck River Watershed, the drainage basin contains several ponds whose waters eventually drain into the Housatonic. These include Hattertown Pond, Warner Pond, Curtis Pond, Hawley Pond, and a cluster of ponds near Button Shop Road.

Besides the water that enters the river system as rainfall and snowmelt, much water enters the river system from the underlying Pootatuck Aquifer.

The area where the tributary Deep Brook joins the Pootatuck River is a state-regulated wild trout management area, where brook trout reproduce naturally. It is one of only eight such areas in the state, where anglers fish for over-wintering native trout. That area has catch-and-release fishing, in which anglers must return caught trout to the water.