 We are pleased to announce Mike Prusila has been selected as Planning Supervisor for the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission!
Mike, a Lake County native, has a Bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Masters in Urban and Environmental Geography from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He began his career as a planner in the Village of Gurnee, and then started working for Stormwater Management Commission (SMC) as a Watershed Planner after graduate school, and has now been with us for about ten years.
Mike is currently working on his sixth watershed plan, the Des Plaines River plan. In the last ten years, he has developed proposals for and administered 17 grant-funded projects or plans, amounting to more
than $6 million in funding, and resulting in more than $11 million in
project work.
One of Mike's biggest projects was managing the completion of two phases of comprehensive stream restoration along a mile of a ravine stream in Winthrop Harbor. It involved acquiring and managing grants from multiple funding sources, including approximately $1.5 million from USEPA, and leveraging that funding with local resources. Mike worked with a great team of project staff, consultants, and contractors, as well as our partners at the Village and the local residents, some of whom were participants in the project as well.
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"The best part of my job is getting my boots wet. If you’re someone who has an interest in water resources, there really is no substitute for observing conditions in the marsh or stream first-hand. The other great thing about this job, and working for SMC in general, is that I get to work with an extensive network of people, ranging from individual landowners, to other local governments and organizations, to our project partners at the State and Federal levels.
"I’m always learning something from these partnerships, whether it’s a landowner sharing the history of a project site, or a resource scientist sharing new data. This network benefits Lake County by enabling us to more efficiently share services locally and leverage our collective resources to plan and implement projects.
"We will be completing a plan for the entire Des Plaines River watershed in Lake County in 2018, which is the largest of the County’s four major watersheds. The number of watershed plans we’ve completed recently is a great legacy that Patty Werner is entrusting to the rest of us here, so I’m looking forward to continuing to work to get watershed plans in place for all of Lake County, and maintaining our standing as a leader in implementing projects to reduce flood damages, improve water quality, and enhance water resources. We are currently developing a partnership and funding strategy to update and complete watershed plans in the Lake Michigan watershed.
"We will also conclude the first Countywide Wetland Restoration and Preservation Plan (WRAPP) later this year, so I anticipate that we will also be working with our local partners to pursue in-the-ground wetland restoration opportunities around Lake County."
Mike will spend the next few weeks acclimating to his new role, which will be fully effective on July 3rd. We sincerely congratulate him and are excited to see where the future will take us.
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