All eight states have to agree to the request, and there are still a lot of questions remaining about the plan to withdraw millions of gallons from the Great Lakes to replace Waukesha’s radium-contaminated water supply.
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Waukesha required permission from the eight states – Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and NY – because the city sits outside the Great Lakes Basin.
“Somebody could bring a challenge to it, but I would think there are low odds with any kind of challenge”, he said. He says that could cause health and safety concerns from those swimming in the river or near where it feeds into the Great Lakes. It has to be a unanimous vote of the eight Great Lakes states to allow the withdrawal to occur.
The EPA had given the community of about 70,000 people until 2018 to find a suitable and safe solution to their drinking water problem, but city officials said it would not be able to meet that deadline.
A Great Lakes compact prohibits most diversions of water outside the watershed boundaries, but allows for communities such as Waukesha, which straddles a border, to request an exemption.
Fear that Waukesha would set a precedent for a host of supplicants was one of the biggest obstacles in the city’s quest to tap Lake Michigan, which began several years before the compact was signed. Since that decree was issued, subsequent inquires have uncovered diversion levels exceeding the agreed upon amount by almost 15% as well as insufficiently slow accounting practices, seriously calling into question promises that we can enforce the return of water diverted by Waukesha.
Other Wisconsin communities with radium contamination issues have successfully treated their water, or drilled deeper wells, she said. A six-year appeal process dissected the project’s merits and collected public comments from citizens in the Great Lakes states whose water – unequivocally the region’s most valuable resource – is at stake. So, it shouldn’t have access to the Great Lakes, Paterson argued. “If you start loosely interpreting an exception, you are opening the door wide to every straddling county and every straddling city all around the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence in the US and Canada”, Ullrich said. At the time Julie Ekman with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said Governor Dayton was “still consulting with stakeholders” on Waukesha’s application. According to an agreement signed by the eight states, only localities within the Great Lakes basin can draw water from the lakes. “The quality and depth of that analysis was critical in persuading the other states and provinces”, he said.
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Waukesha, for its part, must be relieved that it will have a clean source of drinking water for its residents.
