The City of Waukesha, Wisconsin says it has nowhere else to go for water but to the Great Lakes. This week, it submitted an application to take 10 million gallons a day, on average, from Lake Michigan. But first it would have to meet a number of strict requirements that all eight Great Lakes states have agreed to.
Exception to Ban
The states hammered out a ban on water diversions over several years and the governors signed it and the Congress ratified it five years ago.
Peter Annin with Notre Dame University has written extensively about water issues. He says Waukesha has a good case to make for an exception to the ban but it won’t be easy. “And because it is so precedent setting, it’s the first case of its kind under the Great Lakes Compact, it will receive an enormous amount of attention,” Annin says.
Under the compact cities inside the Great Lakes Basin can use water. Waukesha is west of Milwaukee, just outside the boundary line. But it’s in a county that straddles that line. That’s why it can apply for an exception to the ban on diversions.
High Hurdles
The city’s main water well is quickly becoming depleted and it’s contaminated with naturally occurring radium. Even so, it will have to pass a number of high hurdles to get approval to pipe water from Lake Michigan. The city would have to treat and return all the water it would take. And it must show a strong effort to conserve water use. Even then, all eight Great Lakes Governors still have to approve the request.
The water manager for Waukesha, Dan Duchniak, thinks the city has thoroughly addresses all the issues. “And I believe the three thousand pages of documentation that we have to support our application will put us in a good position to receive an approval from the Great Lakes governors,” he says.
Not So Fast
But some environmental groups aren’t so sure about that. They question whether Waukesha could use other options instead of taking water from Lake Michigan. “Could they use existing wells? Could they tap into shallow wells or a combination of both to get their sources of water,” asks Marc Smith with the National Wildlife Federation.
The city of Waukesha argues that it’s becoming increasingly expensive to remove contaminants from its existing water supply. And new shallow wells would use up groundwater that now supports thousands of acres of wetlands and streams.
The compact says taking Great Lakes water has to be Waukesha’s only reasonable option. Peter Annin says the problem is no one knows how the governors will interpret that term “reasonable”. “You know, it’s in the document. But what does that really mean? And how desperate does a community have to be,” Annin says.
Extra Helping
Another potential sticking point is that Waukesha is asking for more water than it needs for itself. That’s because the state of Wisconsin requires the city to plan water use as a district with surrounding communities.
Annin says that may be a good practice for Wisconsin but it’s not required in the Great Lakes Compact. “The other states may say that’s a water grab or mission creep and they may not approve it,” he says.
It’s a key point that raises a red flag for environmental groups too. Some of them fought to make sure an exception to the ban couldn’t be used to pump water for sprawling development outside the natural boundary of the Great Lakes Basin.
Marc Smith with National Wildlife Federation says they won’t fight Waukesha’s application for diversion if it meets all legal requirements. But they’re going to scrutinize it carefully to see that it doesn’t open chinks in the agreement. “We want to make sure this application is consistent with the Great Lakes Compact because we want to see the Great Lakes Compact work,” Smith says.
Waukesha’s water manager, Dan Duchniak, says the city also wants to prove that the compact works. “And that the exceptions that were allowed for in the compact apply. And that will hopefully set the law in stone as we move forward,” he says.
First, the application would have to be approved by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, then by the governor and finally by the other seven Great Lakes governors.
