Sunday, January 11, 2009

When It Comes To Water Policy - - Silence, Please

A Journal Sentinel columnist and editorial board member has had it with all those questions being raised about Waukesha's quest for Lake Michigan water.

Dang questions!

Imagine asking for scientific details and other information about piping Great Lakes water out of its basin, then returning it as wastewater to a tributary that can flood - - then into a watershed where millions and millions of dollars have been spent on water quality and other environmental improvements.

The temerity of people wanting some details - - especially since the City of Waukesha hasn't even disclosed its application yet.

Look for the City of Wauwatosa (the projected tributary dumping site), the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Waukesha taxpayers, and the seven other Great Lakes states to be asking the same kinds of questions...and more...and demanding answers...to some preliminary questions that were easily dismissed by the columnist.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is curious and telling to see how, when it comes to demanding Great Lakes water that the editorial insists Waukesha is Milwaukee's "fast growing part," and that the metropolitan area is the dying part.

From what I've discerned, Waukesha usually acts and insists that it is part of nothing else, completely separate, and, an entity onto itself when it comes to topics like cooperation with regional transit or something as mundane as planning for affordable housing for their own work force, that would be beneficial to all regional stakeholders.

The fast growing part of the region here, seems to me to be the uncontrolled cancer, intent on devouring the host. A cancer has no regard for the host it depends on to survive. Lake Michigan water should not be used to feed this tumor.

"Thanks to falling water tables and changing radium rules..." one apparent argument in that editorial, that Waukesha sprawl and lack of prior long-range planning and apparent prior denial of the the natural limits of growth, i.e. the amount of available groundwater, somehow just happened, and was not anticipated or knowable or anybody's fault, is laughable.

Anonymous said...

Waukesha does not get one drop of Lake Michigan water.