Board & Staff
The Friends of the Winooski River is led by a volunteer Board of Directors.
Allen Banbury (Treasurer) is a retired mathematics teacher with a passionate interest in rivers in general and the Winooski river and watershed specifically. Their health, and their utilization to enhance life in the communities they pass through are his main interests. A native of California, who came to Marshfield via Hawaii, Colorado and Pennsylvania, he lives on the banks of the Winooski and fishes and canoes its waters. He is also on the Marshfield Conservation Commission and spends part of his time involved with the mathematics program at Twinfield Union school.
Bill Haines is a retired educator who lives in Worcester Vermont and is currently Chairperson of the Selectboard. During his “working” years, he taught social studies at Montpelier High School and continues to teach canoeing for physical education classes at the Wrightsville reservoir and on the Winooski River. With his home of thirty-four years overlooking the North Branch of the Winooski, Bill recognizes the value of the river through different lenses. One of his more recent endeavors was to work with a neighboring farmer to plan and rebuild his failing manure pit. He helped coordinate local volunteers for a geomorphic assessment of the North Branch in Worcester, too. During the past fifteen years, he has been a continuing force in promoting and coordinating river clean-ups in the Central Vermont area. In joining the Friends of the Winooski, Bill brings along numerous contacts in the education field as well as practical experience in local government.
Linda Henzel (Secretary) lives in Montpelier and works as a planner for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. She has lived in the Winooski watershed for more than 20 years and feels a special connection due to commuting to work along the river for at least14 years. She helped organize macroinvertebrate sampling on the Huntington River tributary as a member and chair of that conservation commission. Other river activities included leading the Addison County River Watch Collaborative’s E. coli monitoring efforts and coordinating streambank restoration and school programs for the Lewis Creek Association for ten years. She authored Erosion, Land Use, and Stream Ecology: A Manual for Lake Champlain Basin Communities for the Lake Champlain Committee as a requirement for her M.S. degree in natural resources planning from the University of Vermont.
Beverly Lavin has watched the Winooski River evolve from a much narrower waterway with deep drop-offs to the wide silt-laden and shallow river of today. Now the owner of her family's farm, she has had riverbank restoration done to help stop erosion. Retired from Green Mountain Institute for Environmental Democracy, she enjoys spending time on the farm and in the river.
Colin McCaffrey (President) is a professional songwriter, performer, and record producer. He is an avid trout fisherman and amateur biologist with a passionate lifelong interest in habitat preservation and improvement in Vermont’s waters. He was born and raised by the Connecticut River and now lives on the Kingsbury branch of the Winooski River in East Montpelier, VT. In 2006 – along with fourth grade students at Union Elementary School in Montpelier - Colin combined his love of songwriting and the river to produce a full length recording and publication entitled THE RIVER GIVES TO ME: Vermont History Through Song and Story. The recording is a celebration of our rivers from past into the future, and their central role in our lives as Vermonters. Colin hopes to continue using his public profile to educate and inform area residents of the work being done by Friends Of The Winooski River.
Jim Pease (Vice President) is a biologist employed by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, Water Quality Division, Stormwater Section. Mr. Pease administers the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) NPDES permit. He has been involved with the development and implementation of watershed management plans for stormwater-impaired watersheds across the state. He was a participant in the Lake Champlain Basin Program’s Urban Stormwater Characterization Project in Vermont and New York and is the author of the LCBP Technical Report: Urban Nonpoint Pollution Source Assessment of the Greater Burlington Area. He has been with VTDEC for 15 years, preceding that he was associated with the University of Vermont’s Water Resources Center and the USDA Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Burlington. He has a M.S. in Biology from the University of Virginia.
Anne Sarcka became interested in the Winooski watershed when she moved to Montpelier in 1978. As VT Arts Council’s coordinator of community programs, she established a grant program to fund artists working on environmental projects, several of which involved rivers. As a member of the Montpelier Conservation Commission, she participated in producing two Commission publications, the Montpelier Rivers Report, and Enhancing our River Environment: A Proposed Plan for the Management of the Winooski Riverbank Vegetation in Montpelier. In 1997 she and a consortium of several organizations launched “Celebrate the Winooski!”, a river cleanup, festival and education project, which calls attention to the area’s rivers and engages the community in active participation in their enhancement. She has been involved in FWR since its inception in Montpelier, and has served on the board for 3 years.
Staff and Advisors
Dave Braun (Science Advisor)is a consulting environmental scientist for Stone Environmental, Inc. specializing in water resources research and stormwater management. He holds an M.S. degree in Water Resources from the University of Vermont and a B.S. degree in Biology. He lives with his family in Montpelier. Dave was a founding officer of the Friends of the Winooski River and led or participated in numerous water quality projects with the Friends between 1996 and 2000. Dave’s primary activities with the group during this period were river trash clean-up, streambank stabilization, tree planting, illicit discharge surveys, and stormdrain stenciling in Montpelier and neighboring communities. Dave left the board of the Friends in 2001, although he remains a committed volunteer. In 2006, Dave assisted the Friends as an independent contractor on a comprehensive elicit discharge detection and elimination project conducted with the City of Barre. The project included tracking down the sources of contaminated discharges to the Stevens Branch and its tributaries in Barrethat were discovered during the project.
Ann Smith (Program Director) Prior to moving to Vermont in 2004, Anne was the Director of Watershed Programs for the Southeast Regional Office of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. In that role, she was responsible for a variety of PEC programs and project dealing with watershed planning, protection and education. It included the facilitation of several watershed partnerships that include a range of stakeholders such as state level environmental agencies, municipal officials and local grassroots organizations to focus on common goals with respect to resource protection and restoration. Ann has a Master of Science in Environmental Policy from the University of Michigan and an Undergraduate degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.