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An international group of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River mayors are requesting a formal hearing to challenge the recent decision to allow a Wisconsin city access to Lake Michigan as a source for drinking water. This week, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative submitted its hearing request to the interstate council which in June allowed the first diversion of regional basin water under the 2008 Great Lakes Compact. On June 21, governors of each U.S. state in the Great Lakes drainage basin unanimously agreed to let Waukesha, Wis., tap Lake Michigan for up to 8.2 million gallons per day once it completes a $207 million pipeline project. Waukesha must return all that water as treated effluent piped to a Lake Michigan tributary. Nonetheless, the request was highly controversial. Critics say the precedent weakens legal protections against diverting Great Lakes water. The 2008 accords prohibit water from being sent outside the Great Lakes watershed. Communities like Waukesha, located over the line but within a straddling county, can apply under a limited exception. The cities group says the decision opens the door for Great Lakes water to be sent to every neighboring city and county to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Basin in the U.S. and Canada without meeting conditions in the compact. To make sure the Compact and Great Lakes are not compromised in the future, this decision should be overturned, said Mayor Denis Coderre of Montreal, chair of the Cities Initiative. Reaction to Wisconsin city''s OK for Great Lakes water The initiative is a coalition of over 120 U.S. and Canadian cities. The group said it also wrote to U.S. President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the International Joint Commission requesting they intervene. The cities group opposed Waukesha''s water bid leading up to the decision. They took issue with public transparency during the process. The only public hearing held by the Regional Body that recommended approval was held in Waukesha, which is hardly representative of the people in the Region, read a statement from the group. When the final decision included conditions related to some of the problems with Waukesha''s application, no opportunity for comment was permitted on those changes. David Ullrich, director of the Cities Initiative, said the compact allows anyone aggrieved by a council action to request an administrative hearing, with an option to appeal the outcome to federal district court. We have not heard back from the Compact Council as to whether they will grant the hearing and when it might be, he said. Peter Johnson, deputy director of the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers, the umbrella body for the Great Lakes Compact Council, said the hearing request notice was just recently received by the Compact Council, and the Compact Council is determining next steps. Waukesha is under a court-ordered deadline to provide safe drinking water by mid-2018. The city draws most of its water from a deep aquifer that is contaminated with unsafe levels of radium, a naturally occurring carcinogen. The city has a population of about 70,000 people. Justification for the approval rested largely on a complicated hydrologic assessment of the groundwater flow underneath Waukesha, which compact council representatives said already amounts to an unintentional diversion of Lake Michigan water into the Mississippi River basin. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder''s office said approving Waukesha''s application would stop that existing diversion by ending the city''s well water extraction. Waukesha must filter pharmaceuticals and personal care products from the return water flow to the lake, conduct environmental monitoring and document the daily, monthly and annual withdraw and return amounts. Each Great Lakes state can independently conduct audits to inspect Waukesha''s records and the agreement can be withdrawn by the other states at any point if conditions of the agreement are violated. |
