It's increasingly likely that leadership, or lack of same, in the fight to prevent needless Great Lakes water exports will come not from Michigan, the Great Lakes state, but Wisconsin, where diversion fights in two communities loom large. The good news is that Wisconsin has an articulate and determined conservation and environmental community that is mobilizing to protect the Great Lakes. A community that seems to understand that "public trust" is not an empty slogan but a legal doctrine that needs respecting for the health of the Lakes and the people who depend on them.
Waukesha officials have a new strategy in their quest for access to Lake Michigan water: find a lake tributary that can safely handle the city's treated wastewater.
That would save Waukesha water customers millions of dollars by shortening the distance needed to return treated sewage via pipeline to the Great Lakes Basin.
The city of New Berlin is twisting itself in regulatory and bureaucratic knots to meet a Dec. 8 federal deadline and supply all its customers with water that has had naturally occuring radium removed. But an August letter from the EPA shows the city first exceeded a federal radium standard 23 years ago, giving it plenty of time to avoid the now-looming deadline.
Though it signed a consent decree in January 2004 to meet a radium-removal deadline within 34 months (by Dec. 8 of this year), New Berlin has said it will miss the deadline in part because it doesn't want to spend about $4 million on the necessary equipment.
Instead, it hired the consulting firm of Ruekert/Mielke to work with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and convince the other seven Great Lakes states to allow a diversion of water from Lake Michigan to that portion of New Berlin that lies outside of the Great Lakes basin.
http://www.wisopinion.com/index.iml?mdl=article.mdl&article=5373
Posted by Dave at October 9, 2006 07:05 AM