Wisconsin Cheese Company Fined $237,500 For Clean Water Act Violations

GREEN COUNTY, WI — A Monroe, Wisconsin, cheese manufacturer was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to pay a $237,500 fine after pleading guilty to a criminal Clean Water Act violation, U.S. Attorney Chadwick M. Elgersma announced.

Wisconsin Cheese Group, LLC was sentenced Thursday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Anita M. Boor.

In addition to the fine, the company must make improvements to its facility and work with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on future permitting issues. The company pleaded guilty to the charge on June 4, 2026.

Prosecutors said that between June 6 and Nov. 5, 2022, Wisconsin Cheese Group disrupted the Village of Monticello's wastewater treatment works on 19 separate days by releasing untreated wastewater from its cheese manufacturing plant into the municipal sewer system.

The company exceeded its permit's biological oxygen demand limit by wide margins, including multiple discharges that topped the limit by more than 1,500 percent.

It is a federal crime for an industrial user of a public treatment system to negligently discharge pollutants in a way that causes a municipality to violate its federally enforceable wastewater permit.

Investigators found that at the time of the discharges, Wisconsin Cheese Group lacked specific controls to ensure permit compliance and had not adequately trained employees on wastewater management.

Judge Boor said the violations were entirely avoidable with better planning as the company ramped up production at its Monticello plant, and that the company overwhelmed the local treatment plant and became a neighborhood polluter.

She also criticized the company's lackluster response to its early violations, which she said allowed the misconduct to continue for months. The judge did credit the company for cooperating with investigators and committing to facility upgrades, conditions that will now be enforced as part of its probation.

Allison Landsman, special agent in charge of the EPA's criminal enforcement program in Wisconsin, said the company's criminally negligent discharges disrupted the sewer system on multiple occasions and warned that Clean Water Act violations can threaten human health, wildlife and the environment. She said the guilty plea reflects the seriousness of the case and the agency's commitment to protecting Wisconsin's waterways.

The case was investigated by the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Megan Stelljes.