Housatonic Valley’s ‘Conservation Hero’ leaves lasting legacy

Lynn Werner, executive director of the Housatonic Valley Association, has been a driving force in land and water conservation for more than 40 years.
Debra A. Aleksinas
Lynn Werner, executive director of the Housatonic Valley Association, has been a driving force in land and water conservation for more than 40 years.
“Her heart is always with the water, and yet under her leadership, HVA became more than a watershed organization but also an accredited land trust.” —Tim Abbott, conservation director, Housatonic Valley Association
CORNWALL — Lynn Werner was smitten by the smelts.
Fresh out of college, she landed a job as a researcher with the state fisheries division counting young salmon.
“It was a phenomenal job. We would set up traps mid-stream and count the smelts in there and then release them. I would hang onto the rocks and just be one with the water,” as the small, silvery fish sparkled and splashed around her.
“I could have done that forever,” she recalled.
Fortunately for the Cornwall-based Housatonic Valley Association, which she joined in 1982, Werner soon found herself advocating for the streams, rivers, wetlands and forests that had been such an integral part of her youth.
“I benefitted from the Clean Water Act. If I had to sit next to a river or lake and not be able to swim in it, that would be my idea of torture,” said Werner, 67, who has been a staunch advocate in land and water conservation for more than four decades.
Since she became executive director in 1995, HVA has expanded its staff from five to 17, quadrupled its budget and launched transformative conservation initiatives.
Earlier this year, Werner announced her plan to retire from her role at HVA effective June 30.
“We just finished our strategic plan, and I felt it was a good time,” she explained recently over a cup of coffee at the Warren General Store, a short distance from her Kent home.
“I started discussing it in earnest in 2023, going into 2024 with several board members,” Werner explained. A search committee has selected her yet unnamed successor and plans to make the announcement later this month.
In the meantime, Werner said she will be assisting with the transition.
Long list of accomplishments
As executive director, Werner oversees the day-to-day management of the association including collaborating with individuals, groups and agencies with the goal of maintaining a healthy river system.
The association recently received an accreditation renewal from the Land Trust Accreditation Commission for a third five-year term.
Werner’s list of accomplishments includes the restoration of Furnace Brook Fishway in Cornwall that allowed trout to swim upstream to spawn for the first time in 20 years. She also was instrumental in ensuring that General Electric and the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) clean up the PCBs in the watershed system and created the River Smart campaign to study the impact of polluted runoff and how to reduce it.
HVA, under Werner’s leadership, successfully fought to reroute a natural gas pipeline away from protected lands and wetlands, stopped a superhighway route through the scenic river ridgeline and saved 6,000 acres of river valley from developers.
She credited collaboration, both within HVA and in the communities, as the key to her success. “You can only be as great as the team you’re working with, and we’ve also been fortunate to collaborate with so many wonderful partners. There is a really strong network of both nonprofits and community leaders working to protect this tristate river valley, and this gives me hope for the future.”
The association also launched the “Follow the Forest” initiative to protect a connected woodland wildlife corridor and conducted educational programs for kindergarten to high school students on biology, ecology and chemistry of the watershed.
“Protecting the core forest corridor throughout the Housatonic River watershed makes climate resiliency sense. And this region is part of a much larger corridor stretching into Canada,” she explained.
Werner stressed the importance of getting kids with “nature deficit disorder” involved in the environment, as they are the environmental leaders of the future.
What you love, you protect, said Warner, who early on in her career co-chaired and helped form the Clean Water Coalition and served on the legislature’s Aquifer Protection Task Force.“And most kids seem to love a good splash in a stream, and especially a nose-to-nose moment with a frog, it’s a joy to behold.”
Werner felt that defending nature begins in the place where you live.
“A lot of people don’t know how much power they have,” she noted. “Take a stand where you are, small or big. Join the fight to protect that river or woodland or meadow or view that you love. And everyone can do one important thing in their own backyard or neighborhood to keep a stream healthy and a fish friendly, or feed and shelter butterflies and birds, or let rain replenish groundwater and wetlands. If you’re not sure where to start, just ask your favorite conservation group.”
Rivers, by their gentle beauty, are always moving, they’re always singing and the sound that they make is always soothing, reflected Werner.
“That river can’t fight for itself. It gives so much when you think about all that beauty, all that spiritual replenishment, all that life. We’re its voice and sometimes we have to fight for it.”
Lauded as ‘Conservation Hero’
In late March, the Connecticut Land Conservation Council (CLCC) honored Werner with its coveted Conservation Hero Award for her legacy of transformative leadership in the Housatonic Valley.
The council cited her role as co-founder of the Litchfield Hills Greenprint, her success with preserving more than 15,000 acres through the Stanley Works project, riverfront greenways and recent woodland corridor conservation.
Werner’s advocacy, according to the CLCC, has shaped public policy, strengthened stream flow protections, wetland conservation and strategic land preservation.
“She was instrumental in securing a settlement from General Electric for PCB contamination clean-up and helped achieve the 2022 Wild & Scenic designation for forty-one miles of the Housatonic River.”
HVA President Tony Zunino lauded Werner’s 40-year tenure with the organization earlier this year during its Annual Auction for the Environment. “Lynn’s leadership and vision has made an indelible mark on the Housatonic Valley Association,” he said in announcing her intent to retire.
Tim Abbott, conservation director at HVA, said her passion stems from her start back in the early 1980’s as a fisheries researcher with the state.
“She still looks back with evident joy and pride on the time she got to spend in rivers and streams counting salmon smelts. Her heart is always with the water, and yet under her leadership, HVA became more than a watershed organization but also an accredited land trust.”
Reflecting on Werner’s leadership style, Abbott noted: “HVA’s core conservation approach — collaborative, solution-oriented, grounded in science and the conviction that strong partners can do far more together than any of us can do alone — are Lynn’s greatest gift and legacy.”
Werner credited her entire team at HVA for their motivation, knowledge and talent. “It’s an honor, a joy, to work every day with such skilled and passionate people.”
In her retirement, Werner said she is looking forward to spending more time with her husband, seeing her grandchildren more, learning new cooking styles and staying connected to environmental causes.
She currently serves as president of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, is on the board of the Connecticut Legislative Conservation Voters and the Steep Rock Association.
“I am looking to stay in the game in a different way and be able to provide hands-on help in a way I haven’t been able to. It’s been an incredible journey and I have been incredibly fortunate.”
The entrance to Torrington Transfer Station.
TORRINGTON — Municipalities holding out for a public solid waste solution in the Northwest Corner have new hope.
An amendment to House Bill No. 7287, known as the Implementor Bill, signed by Governor Ned Lamont, has put the $3.25 million sale of the Torrington Transfer Station to USA Waste & Recycling on hold.
The amendment was added after the formation of the Northwest Resource Recovery Authority in Torrington in late May. The text added to the bill reads, “any permit or license relating to the Torrington Transfer Station shall be deemed transferred to the Northwest Resource Recovery Authority, or its designee, and shall continue in full force and effect.”
The change halted the sale to USA, which was unanimously accepted by MIRA Dissolution Authority at its May 14 board meeting, and reopened negotiations with municipal leaders. Torrington is one of two transfer stations in Connecticut, the other being Essex, that are still operated by MIRA-DA. Combined, more than 20 towns currently utilize these facilities.
Members of the Northwest Hills Council of Governments have been working to establish a public option for solid waste management for more than a year. In February 2025, MIRA-DA entered into a term sheet for a regional waste authority to take over the Torrington Transfer Station to be used as a central hub for regional hauling. Those plans were nixed after MIRA-DA’s May decision to privately sell the facility, until the amendment to HB 7287.
The Implementor Bill is “an act concerning the state budget for the biennium ending June 30, 2027,” according to the state website. It was signed by Lamont in early June.
MIRA-DA reviewed the situation at its board meeting Wednesday, June 18. Conversation mostly took place in executive session, but several speakers participated in public comment.
Supporting a public option, Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone said, “I’m advocating for the local taxpayers for return on the investment that they’ve made over the years through tipping fees.” She continued, “The best way to return that investment is to strongly consider that public option that has been submitted on behalf of the NRRA.”
Selectmen in Cornwall, Falls Village, Goshen, Norfolk, North Canaan, Salisbury and Sharon have all expressed interest in pursuing a public option. Each of these towns continue to haul to Torrington utilizing existing state service agreements, which are due to expire in 2027.
Ed Spinella, attorney representing USA, characterized the Implementor Bill text change as a “rat amendment” that does not affect USA’s proposal. He said he intends to enforce MIRA-DA’s previous acceptance of the sale.
“It’s an enforceable vote and I guarantee you I’m going to make it enforceable,” said Spinella. “We were going to buy the facility regardless of whether or not it had a permit.”
He urged MIRA-DA to produce the necessary paperwork to move forward with the sale.
“I want to sign the documents so we can finish this deal,” said Spinella. “Are you going to be defined by cowering to a rat implementor, rat amendment of the Implementor Bill?”
Following a lengthy executive session June 18 that continued the next day, MIRA-DA recessed without taking action. The meeting was scheduled to continue Monday, June 23, at noon.
In August of 1781, after spending thirty years as an enslaved woman in the household of Colonel John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mumbet, was the first enslaved person to sue for her freedom in court. At the time of her trial there were 5,000 enslaved people in the state. MumBet’s legal victory set a precedent for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1790, the first in the nation. She took the name Elizabeth Freeman.
Local playwrights Lonnie Carter and Linda Rossi will tell her story in a staged reading of “1781” to celebrate Juneteenth, ay 7 p.m. at The Center on Main in Falls Village, Connecticut.Singer Wanda Houston will play MumBet, joined by actors Chantell McCulloch, Tarik Shah, Kim Canning, Sherie Berk, Howard Platt, Gloria Parker and Ruby Cameron Miller. Musical composer Donald Sosin added, “MumBet is an American hero whose story deserves to be known much more widely.”
Houston has shared the stage with stars ranging from Barbra Streisand to Motown great Mary Wells. “I have had the honor of portraying Elizabeth Freeman for three years in “Meet Elizabeth Freeman” by Teresa Miller. Our first reading of “1781” is in celebration of Juneteenth, which is wonderfully symbolic and poignant.” Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery. Two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, word of their freedom finally reached slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865.
Tombstone of Elizabeth Freeman in the “Sedgewick Pie” family burial ground in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Lonnie carter
MumBet, born in 1742 to African enslaved parents, was purchased at age six months by Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, for whom she worked until her thirties. Ashley helped write the 1773 Sheffield Declaration which stated, “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Rumor has it that MumBet overheard a reading of the document. After a traumatic household experience, MumBet left the Ashley home in Bartholomew’s Cobble, walked four miles to Sheffield, and asked attorney and abolitionist Theodore Sedgwick to help her gain her freedom.
Houston shared, “I live in Sheffield near where she was enslaved, in a house she would have passed on her walk from Ashley Falls to Sheffield. I am humbled by the fortitude and inner strength it must have taken for this woman to defy norms and take a stand for her own freedom.We Americans must still stand and fight for our rights to live free.”
Elizabeth Freeman spent her years as a free woman working for wages in the Sedgewick household, saving money to buy her own home in Stockbridge, where she was a midwife and healer. She died in 1829 and is buried in “Sedgewick Pie,” the family burial plot in Stockbridge. One of her great-grandchildren, W.E.B. DuBois, born in Great Barrington, was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. DuBois founded the NAACP.
Her tombstone reads: “She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell.”
The performance of “1781” will take place Thursday, June 19 at 7 p.m. at The Center on Main (103 Main St., Falls Village).Admission is free, donations gratefully accepted.
The new mural painted by students at Saint John Paul The Great Academy in Torrington, Connecticut.
Thanks to a unique collaboration between The Nutmeg Fudge Company, local artist Gerald Incandela, and Saint John Paul The Great Academy in Torrington, Connecticut a mural — designed and painted entirely by students — now graces the interior of the fudge company.
The Nutmeg Fudge Company owner Kristy Barto was looking to brighten her party space with a mural that celebrated both old and new Torrington. She worked with school board member Susan Cook and Incandela to reach out to the Academy’s art teacher, Rachael Martinelli.
“When Susan and Gerald brought this to me, I immediately saw it as a chance for my students to make something meaningful and lasting,” said Martinelli. “It wasn’t just about painting a wall, it was about teaching kids to serve their community through their art.”
Martinelli introduced the project as an after-school club for grades four through eight. “I wanted students who were truly committed,” she explained. Interest was so high that she had to divide participants into rotating grade-level groups, with occasional full-team days for collaboration. The mural became a long-term endeavor, stretching across a school year and a half.
The painting was created on canvas, a nearly 4’ x 27’ roll, donated by Incandela. The paint came courtesy of school principal Ed Goad. With materials secured, the students dove into research, studying maps, landmarks, and city history to inform their designs. “They worked to capture the spirit of Torrington,” Martinelli said. “But also, to match the whimsy of a candy shop.”
The result is a mural that features a playful “candyland” version of the city, where important buildings and landmarks are sized according to their importance to both the client and the community. “They created this hierarchy of bubbles and buildings, this joyful visual story,” Martinelli said. “It’s full of life.”
Beyond art skills, Martinelli witnessed her students develop qualities often harder to teach: teamwork, communication, resilience. “They learned to scale up sketches, mix large batches of paint for consistency, and adapt their work when it overlapped with someone else’s. They really respected each other’s contributions.”
The project also reflected the Academy’s Catholic STREAM (Science, Technology, Religion, Engineering, Arts, and Math) approach to education. “This was STREAM in action,” Martinelli explained. “They used technology to scale and transfer designs, applied math for proportions and spacing, and worked collaboratively to problem-solve. But they also lived their faith — through service, solidarity, and joy.”
Martinelli believes the mural speaks as much to the process as it does to the final product. “Some of the kids who worked on it have already graduated, but they’re coming back for the unveiling. That says something.”
The unveiling of the mural will take place at The Nutmeg Fudge Company on June 11, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., where families, friends, and community members are invited to celebrate the students’ achievement.
Asked what stood out most from the experience, Martinelli said, “For me, the most rewarding part was watching a diverse group of kids work together — different grades, different friend groups — all collaborating with respect, flexibility, and positivity. They created something beautiful, together.”