Fall Regional Spotlight: Keynote Marcy West - Protecting Paradise in the Driftless

WLIA is proud to present Marcy West, as one of our Keynote Speakers at the Fall Regional Meeting, In La Crosse, this October! 

Marcy served as the Executive Director for the Kickapoo Reserve Management Board (KRMB) in the formative years of 1996-2021. The writing of "Protecting Paradise in the Driftless," was a labor of love that documents the 8,600 acres as it evolved through federal government ownership for a proposed dam and constructed lake in Vernon County to the unique arrangement with the State of Wisconsin and Ho-Chunk Nation to own and jointly manage the public property through the KRMB. 

As the Kickapoo Valley Reserve transitioned from Army Corps of Engineers ownership to the State and Ho-Chunk Nation, the use of mapping technology evolved too. Marcy became an accidental customer of land information service technology as Steve Ventura and a team of UW Students and Ho-Chunk Nation staff worked on boundary identification, archeological site location and clean up sites. The visual layout was key to negotiations for the first Memorandum of Understanding and Management Plan between a state and sovereign entity. Through the years, in-house GIS services through the work of Ben Johnston in collaboration with the WDNR and Vernon County continued to illustrate critical information. 
Governor Evers appointed Marcy to the Natural Resources Board (NRB) in January of 2020.   "Serving on the NRB is a wonderful opportunity to continue learning about issues throughout the state. Politics aside, the board gets to see the hard work at the local level and the wonderful collaboration from local, state and federal professionals,"  Marcy said.

In 2021, West accepted a job with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation as the Director for the Office of Rural Prosperity. In July of 2022 she retired from state employment to focus on a variety of projects including finishing this writing project she started way back in 2018. In her free time she enjoys kayaking, hiking and battling invasive species on their land in the Kickapoo Valley.

Make sure to register for the Fall Regional Meeting and get your hotel room now! Additional details, including the full preliminary agenda, can be found on the event page.