Cheryl Nenn of Milwaukee Riverkeeper named 2025 Environmental Hero
The Great Waters Group is pleased to announce that it has named Cheryl Nenn of Milwaukee Riverkeeper as its Environmental Hero of 2025 for her work protecting our waters, and especially for her recent work on data centers. Great Waters Group Chair Jenny Abel presented the award at the holiday party in December.
This is a condensed version of Jenny's remarks:
Cheryl Nenn has worked for Milwaukee Riverkeeper for 23 years. In that time she has contributed greatly to preserving and protecting Milwaukee’s rivers, streams, and Lake Michigan, usually in collaboration with other neighborhood groups and local organizations.
One of the reasons the GWG selected her for the Environmental Hero Award for 2025 is her bold stance on addressing the threat that proposed data centers pose to the environment. After Microsoft bought 80% of the property formerly owned by Foxconn in Racine County, she urged Riverkeeper to file multiple open records requests with the City of Racine asking it to divulge how much water Microsoft planned to use. When the requests went unanswered, she threatened a lawsuit. The city finally disclosed that Microsoft plans to use 1 million gallons on peak days, but Cheryl’s own analysis shows that it is more likely to be 6 million gallons, as the figure that Racine presented doesn’t include indirect water use, like at the power plant in Oak Creek.
Cheryl is continuing to monitor the situation with the data center in Mount Pleasant along with the one planned in Port Washington, where she is supporting residents’ attempts to recall the mayor.
Other accomplishments of Cheryl’s over the past 2+ decades include the protective overlay zone that she and other neighborhood groups got enacted along 8 miles of the Milwaukee River. This new zoning means that developers have to comply with regulations to protect shorelines and trees.
Cheryl’s work with MMSD helped reduce sewer overflows from 50 per year to two or three. She has also been instrumental in the Area of Concern project, a $450 million agreement with the federal government to clean up industrial waste from the bottom of the river. This initiative provides a generational opportunity to restore the health of the Milwaukee River.
Cheryl’s and Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s advocacy has led to the removal of 11 dams along the Milwaukee River, building fish passages, and the new beach at South Shore Park. Thanks to this work, the number of fish species in downtown Milwaukee went from 4 to 45. Cheryl started a water quality monitoring network that now boasts 110 locations monitored by volunteers. She also helped create the Water Trail map that shows all access points along the Milwaukee River, including in Ozaukee County.
If you think that all of this work is enough and that Cheryl should just sit back and bask in her success, nope — she has her eye on many other projects. In addition to keeping pressure on the data centers and helping with the Area of Concern mitigation, she is working on getting two dams removed in Sheboygan County, along with 40 wildlife habitat improvement projects.