Water experts on Wednesday recommended to state legislators that they strengthen groundwater laws by pumping more money into monitoring, broadening protections for springs and possibly increasing the distance between high-capacity wells and sensitive surface waters.

The Legislature beefed up groundwater protections in 2004, but Ken Bradbury, a hydrogeologist with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, said during the hearing that it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the law because there has been no money for monitoring.

The hearing was before a joint meeting of the Senate and Assembly natural resource committees. The hearing was the first step in an effort to improve regulations of groundwater created in the 2004 law. State Sen. Neal Kedzie, R-Elkhorn, one of the co-authors of the initial legislation, said the committees’ examination of groundwater issues is part of a review of the law called for in the 2004 bill.

Though that bill, according to Kedzie and others, was a landmark improvement in groundwater protection — previous law only called for regulation if a well affected a public water supply — issues remain that need to be addressed.

For example, George Kraft, head of the groundwater center at UW-Stevens Point, told committee members that many streams and lakes in central Wisconsin, including the Little Plover River in Portage County and Long Lake in Waukesha County, are drying up this summer because of pumping from municipal and agricultural wells. This is happening, he said, despite a provision in the law that restricts high-capacity wells within 1,200 feet of an important water body, such as a trout stream or a stream classified as an Outstanding Resource Water.

Although both the Little Plover and Long Lake are nearly dry, Kraft said, neither have wells within 1,200 feet, meaning they are being affected by wells that were approved under current law.

Both Kraft and Bradbury recommended that the 1,200-foot provision be re-examined and possibly replaced by criteria more sensitive to local conditions.

Bradbury, as well as Todd Ambs, head of the DNR’s Division of Water, recommended that protection of springs be expanded by changing how springs are defined. Current law only protects springs that have a flow of 1 cubic foot per second or greater at least 80 percent of the time. Ambs suggested the flow requirement be dropped to 0.25 cubic feet per second.

But among the most important proposed changes, according to Bradbury, is more money for monitoring. "We’re seriously underfunded to the point where we’re having to drop monitoring wells," Bradbury said. "Some counties have no wells being monitored. ... This is a serious issue."