By Matt Colston, WALPA Board President
Welcome to the first Waterline of 2023! We have so many things going on at WALPA in this first quarter of the year! We are planning the Western Washington Conference and more outreach opportunities are coming up. The Annual Conference Committee anticipates that the next annual conference will be in either Tacoma or Bellingham at the end of September or beginning of October to avoid being too close to the NALMS conference. Stand by for further information and updates! We are also hoping to open our WALPA store soon, featuring items with a new design along with our classic original.
I do have an ask for you: please join a committee! What’s your specialty? We can always use help with communications or social media. We need support planning the annual (and other) conferences. Maybe you could help with a WALPA public lake guide, one more way we can actively promote inclusion within our field. For the guide we’ll need photos and information on each publicly accessible lake in Washington. Send an email to walpa01@gmail.com if you are interested in helping out in any of these areas. I hope that we can work together to get this all happening before my term concludes at the end of the year.
There is one more way you can help! I am trying to start a little web series called Contours where I talk with lake advocates online and post the videos to our social media. We hope to chat with folks like agency surface water managers, project managers/consultants, students/researchers, lake district board members, and lake association chairs. If you are interested, please let us know at walpa01@gmail.com
