Stella town board hears PFAS update, begins move to another bank

With PFAS contamination in dozens of wells in the town of Stella, a report from the town’s PFAS committee found an attentive audience at the Stella town board meeting May 11 at Stella Town Hall.

Tom LaDue and Dave Brunette were on hand from the committee, with LaDue reporting that the committee has been participating in the Statewide PFAS Coalition through a number of Zoom meetings.

“I wanted to stress that the town of Stella is small and it’s a small population and we don’t want to get lost in the weeds, and I think I made an impression on everybody,” said LaDue.

Last month saw the release of more than $130 million in PFAS funds when Gov. Tony Evers signed into law Assembly Bill 130 and Assembly Bill 131, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 200 and 2025 Wisconsin Act 201. 

“The DNR is hiring 10 new positions and one of them is for private well owners, and who knows how long that’s going to take or what it will involve, but that’s a plus for our town,” said LaDue. 

“…They’re aware that we're here and we need to be heard. So my ideas were ongoing well testing at least annually if not semi-annually on all the wells that people want to have their water tested, because otherwise it’s just a snapshot in time and they don’t know what it’s going to be in the future. So I think that’s an important thing.

“Secondly, increased grant money for drilling a new well. What we have now isn’t much: the family income may not exceed $65,000 for the prior calendar year.The grant program will pay 75% of eligible costs up to $16,000. We all know that wells cost a lot more than that, and that's not right… And thirdly, if people have to put in some kind of a filter system, to get subsidies for filter change-out because those are expensive also.”

He added, “We just came up with a study that PFAS chemicals have been detected in 98.8% of the blood tests that were done on this study with 10,500 samples. So pretty much everybody’s got PFAS in their system already, but we don’t know what that means. Hopefully we’ll get that blood testing through the UW … so hopefully that’ll come to fruition soon. 

“So that’s what I've been working on, getting Stella’s stuff out in front of the statewide people. There are a lot of smart people that are working on this. They’ve been working on it for three, four years as a group, and I just got involved with it a couple months ago.”

“I think we’re due for maybe another town meeting on this,” observed town chairman Casey Crump. 

New bank accounts

Town clerk Stacy Schickert updated the board on progress in changing banks. After several fraudulent bank withdrawal attempts, most recently an attempted ACH withdrawal, the board had decided at a special meeting April 27 to move the town’s checking and money market accounts from Associated Bank to Peoples State Bank. 

Schickert reported two accounts have been opened at Peoples State Bank. “We have a money market — well, they call it an interest-bearing checking account — and then we have a non-interest-bearing checking account, which will be our general,” she said, adding that she would be depositing a $322,520 check in the interest-bearing checking account the next day.

“We’ll leave the Associated Bank checking account fully open until all the checks from this month clear, and then we will change that to a deposit-only checking account because we’re waiting for some funds, reimbursement funds and grants, to come in,” Schickert continued. “ … We’ll leave it open for like six months like that to make sure we get all of our stuff, and then we’ll close all of our accounts out at Associated, and everything will be transferred over to Peoples.”

ARIP road project

Jeff Seamandel of engineer MSA Professional Services was on hand to report on the May 6 bid opening for the town’s $4 million Agricultural Roads Improvement Program (ARIP) project, which is funded by a grant for projects that directly impact roads used for purposes such as agriculture and forestry.

Seamandel said four bids were received, ranging from $2.3 million to $2.7 million.

“There was a lot of interest in the project prior to the bid; the phone was ringing off the hook, asking questions,” he said. “ … The prices came in extremely cheap, so it’s our recommendation that you do award it to Pitlik and Wick for $2,316,073.50.”

The board agreed in a unanimous vote.

“As far as them starting, they told us middle of July, but we’ll try to get a ballpark,” said Seamandel. “It’s up to them to provide us a schedule as to how long it’s going to take, so at the pre-con (meeting), I’ll make sure that they can bring one so we’ll know at the pre-con exactly when they think they’re going to be done.”

Among other highlights of the meeting, the board decided Stella should have a town road supervisor.

Town supervisor Jerome Pokorny was assigned the new role, and will manage general road maintenance throughout the year, with a budget of $25,000 for the remainder of 2026. Projects over $5,000 will need to be brought to the board for approval.

The next meeting of the Stella town board will be June 9 at 5 p.m. at Stella Town Hall.

Ardith Carlton may be reached at [email protected].