Betraying, not Bettering, the Environment with Ludington Councilor Kathy Winczewski

[XLFD]

Kathy Winczewski has served as a Ludington City Councilor for a dozen years, but she has also been affiliated with the local environmentalist group, A Few Friends of the Environment and the World (AFFEW), for even longer.  AFFEW was created in 1990, due to the founders' concerns for the increase in cancer in Mason County.  Their ongoing mission is to provide educational opportunities for the Mason County community by actively promoting a healthy and thriving environment.

Kathy moved up in the AFFEW organization during her time on council, becoming vice-president for years staring in her first term.  She has represented the AFFEW organization over the last seven years at least in the Local Emergency Planning Committee of Mason County.  AFFEW recognized her as Environmentalist of the Year for 2023.  "She's been a champion for a healthy environment for a long time", said AFFEW founder and president, Julia Chambers.  

In accepting the honor, Kathy would quote Carl Sagan:  "Everything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air or drink the water.  Don't sit this out. Do something.  You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet."

If that wasn't enough to establish her environmental bona fides, she was recognized by the Michigan Municipal League with an Ambassador Award in 2024 (Level 4 in the elected officials academy) with an acknowledgment not only of her completion of education offered to local officials, but of her prowess in the field made by the MML Board President Robert E. Clark:  

“Her dedication to public service is especially evident through her environmental work. She is committed to protecting our natural resources, especially our water and parks and recreation. This award is another example of her commitment to bettering our communities.”

As Kathy is about to enter her 13th and last year as a city councilor and at least her third decade as a member of AFFEW, one would think her legacy as an environmentally conscious member of society is secured, but her public facade of eco-friendliness is betrayed by her actions as a public servant, where she has chosen to tow the corporate line rather than fight the good fight in being a champion for a healthy Ludington environment, dedicated to clean water for our local ecosystem.

We had signs of this a while ago when she unilaterally defended the city's water system against facts that Mason County was the leader or runner-up in children lead levels in their blood for the state over what was then the prior three years, when Flint was having its well-aired water crisis.   In early 2017, she stated after The Ludington Torch had made the point regularly:  "There's no lead in any pipes that we know of in the city, so in 19 years that [Utility Maintenance Supervisor Darrell Plamondon] has been down in those holes, he has not noticed any lead pipes down there."  Plamondon would rebut her that same meeting.

She had to revise her statement as we brought forth unearthed lead pipes from Ludington and suggested several other factors may have contributed to having high lead readings in our children but came to a conclusion in December 2017 that she "did not believe [elevated blood lead levels in our children] is coming from Ludington's city water situation."

While her words may have been comforting for those not paying close attention, her admissions that lead goosenecks were all over the Fourth Ward (being recovered and replaced with water main projects in that area) and subsequent revelations that they were plentiful other locations where these were at, showed that many children in Ludington would be potentially exposed to water with unacceptable levels of lead in it.  When she wasn't giving out incorrect information and purveying science fallacies, her message of "enjoy your safe Ludington water" was echoed throughout this period primarily by herself, while she tried to point to other lead bugbears, none of which could explain the difference between our counties and others of lead-infested children being anything else but in the water systems. 

 

While the State of Michigan has implemented measures to find and get lead pipes out of municipal water systems within 20 years, she has failed to champion that clean water cause in any way.  This is part of the established record, where for years she chose to defend lead pipes in the city water system over the public health and safe water.  She cemented that ignominious legacy by her recent actions/inactions when confronted with evidence that city, state, and private actors have endangered the public health and polluted our waters. 

Consider the recent revelations that Jefferson Henry and Ray Karboske have uncovered and brought awareness to at council meetings and their Pere Marquette Lake Watershed Council (PMLWC) organization.  Starting off as a simple legal action in order to get the MI DNR supervisor to answer some questions regarding the authority of the state Waterways Commission, the focus has expanded greatly as FOIA responses tumble in and shows not only contradictory information in the historical documents, but also a host of environmental concerns 

The transition towards environmental concerns started in April 2025 with revelations that the City of Ludington was lax on telling the folks that a major infusion of raw sewage into PM Lake occurred after a sewer force main ruptured.  Nearly one million gallons of raw sewage was bypass pumped into that lake on a Monday, on Tuesday our health department told us that the lake tested high for E. Coli, and the newspaper finally told us it was a "water main crisis" on Wednesday.  The City itself remained silent on the issue the whole time, even though it had multiple outlets including social media pages and their own website.  Totally irresponsible.

Henry and Karboske, joined often by this reporter and Daniel Jensen, have been bringing receipts to the table at every council meeting since April, pointing to longstanding, continuing, and unremedied contamination identified in studies, but ignored even more than bypass pumping of raw sewage by the city.  And what has been the response of the most senior member of the council, the supposed steward of the local environment, Councilor Kathy Winczewski?  

On May 5th, she told us about how nice spring in Ludington was.

On May 19th, she told us of summertime opportunities and about an upcoming Coffee with the Councilors meeting.

On June 9th, she told us how successful Love Ludington weekend, and the Invasive Species workshop were.

On June 23, she commented on beautiful weather and events in Ludington, an upcoming CWTC meeting, and what see saw at a Hamlin board meeting.

On July 14, she thanked those involved with the Freedom Festival, and talked of Japanese Knotweed.

On July 28, she admitted a self-imposed ignorance about contamination from Dow or Oxy or any other entity (such as the city wastewater treatment plant) into PM Lake but knows of such in the northern part of the city, as she regularly gives the Public Safety Committee an update on it, in what reasonable people might say is a report made with a conflict-of-interest inherent.

It strains credibility that someone who has at least three decades with AFFEW, more decades of being a chemistry teacher in the LASD, and twelve years behind her on the city council, would claim total ignorance of contamination in the Pere Marquette Lake by the City of Ludington and two chemical companies with major frontage on that body of water.  Perhaps this was her first manifestation of denying the facts, as she did when she initially and confidently stated that there were no lead pipes in the Ludington water system back in 2017.

It also strains credibility that she would remain ignorant of the taint after being presented studies this year from 2009 showing the PM Lake is being contaminated every second by Dow's holding ponds and the surveys by the DNR, DEQ (EGLE) that led to tens of millions of dollars in revamping and reorienting the wastewater treatment plant that she approved of during the last decade.  

What everybody should be well aware of is that the PM Lake and PM River is the only inland waterway in the 14 county NW section of Lower Michigan (other than 28"+ Lake Trout in Torch Lake) that the DNR warns you should not eat the fish:

In contrast, Hamlin Lake has no such restrictions and only warns about mercury levels being of concern, not the more troubling levels of PCBs and PFOS that have infused itself into the PM lake from industrial and perhaps other sources.  Lincoln Lake, on the north side of the city and the likely receptacle of the contamination reported on by Kathy to the Public Safety Committee has no such restrictions, and is of low concern.  At least that's what Kathy tells us all.  

Yet, as noted, Kathy has told us that she knows nothing, nothing about contamination in PM Lake even when the data was out there for her when the WWTP required costly updates, even when the 2009 report from Dow noted an unacceptable risk to our clean water. 

Our readers and she especially, need to go to the PMLWC website and check out the data.  They are focused on historical records, studies, and science and would welcome any further inquiry and skepticism, as this would spur the dialog and additional research that needs to precipitate in any solution that appears.  Review the data, watch the videos, and try to grasp the extent of the problem at the PMLWC website.

 

[Daniel Jensen]

After reading this, I decided it needed to be shared. The Gateway Pundit would be proud Mr. Rotta, BRAVO! BRAVO!

[XLFD]

Thanks for sharing, I mean this in two ways.  The last (and only) Ludington story to go national on the Gateway Pundit's pages was back in 2021 when a career violent criminal was let out on very low bail of the Mason County 79th District Court and killed a young woman in Mt. Pleasant.  This article may have a lot to interest local and even state residents, but even had I wrote like George Orwell or Rachel Carson, this probably won't interest media that caters to a national audience unaware of all the backstories.  For now.