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The Great Lakes Compact:
Producer's Diary
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Reflections from Producer Art Hackett
This is a story I've been following since 1985 when then Wisconsin Governor Anthony Earl signed the Great Lakes Annex. View a copy of the segment I filed for Wisconsin Magazine, the show I was working on at the time:
That was a much bigger deal than the updated compact signed in 2006. More governors were there (including Mario Cuomo of New York) and more Canadian Premiers.
At that time the big fear was exporting Great Lakes water to the southwest. As we reported in the 1985 segment, studies by several federal agencies had already said moving water that distance was not economically feasible regardless of whether it was legal.
Today the fear is exporting water just past the sub-continental divide to suburban communities.
Then we did the segment which aired in 2006. The elephant in the room that people were trying to ignore was the issue of suburban sprawl and the economic competition between older cities like Milwaukee and suburban areas like Waukesha County.
Under the 1985 agreement Waukesha, which wants Lake Michigan water because its well water is contaminated with radium, is pretty much out of luck. If you're outside the Great Lakes basin, you can't have Great Lakes water. The updated compact gives counties which straddle the basin boundaries permission to use the water if they follow certain rules. Complying with those rules may be difficult and expensive but they at least provide a set of instructions to follow if you want to do it.
To interpret those instructions you need to understand groundwater flows. Hydrogeology is complicated. If you want to find out more about this, the UW Geological and Natural History Survey and the US Geological Survey have prepared a model of groundwater flows in southeast Wisconsin (external link).
But there is a second story here. That story involves something other than water. It involves economic development's winners and losers.
Here are some of the questions people danced around: Is Great Lakes water the trump card? If the suburbs can't access the water, will their growth stop forcing business and people into the City of Milwaukee?
Or: Is suburban development inevitable? Will Waukesha County keep heading west towards Madison, sinking wells as development continues? That is legal since it's all in the same water basin. Whether it's good environmental policy or not is another matter. Some of the development is on land which recharges the aquifer from which Waukesha now draws water.
And thousands of years from now, that water will wind up in the Great Lakes.
We interviewed Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson for the segment and talked about the growth and sprawl implications of the debate over the compact. Unfortunately, only a small piece of the footage made it into the final report. View expanded versions of the interviews with Mayors Barrett and Nelson here.
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