Lake Monroe, with a 276,000 acre watershed, is the sole water source for 128,000 customers in Monroe County and a supplemental source for Brown County. In mid-2017 a small group – including representatives from The Nature Conservancy, City of Bloomington Utilities, Friends of Lake Monroe and others – began meeting to explore the feasibility of forming a Water Fund to connect a funding source with the management and sustainability goals of Lake Monroe. As a result, the Lake Monroe Water Fund incorporated in 2021 as the 43rd water fund enabled by The Nature Conservancy, the 13th in the US and the first one in Indiana. Our sole purpose is to be a financing source for mitigating threats to the water quality of Lake Monroe from sedimentation, nutrient runoff, and 9,000+ septic systems, many old and poorly maintained. We are uniquely positioned as a water fund that formed proactively, not in response to a crisis, because it costs less to prevent water quality problems than to recover from them!
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