Stop Underestimating Water's Real Value

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calculates the dollar value of possible water sales to communities west of Milwaukee, including some on the far side of the sub-continental divide.

A few million a year, total, from projected sales to many communities, based on your standard utility operating checklists: wholesale water rates, certain service charges, etc., etc.

This is the same narrow view of the water issue framing the ongoing area supply study by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission:

Straight Econ 101 - - supply and demand.

Who needs water? Waukesha, et al.

Who's got excess pumping capacity, and access to Lake Michigan water?

Why, none other than Milwaukee, whose Water Utility Manager, Carrie Lewis, is quoted in the Journal Sentinel story as a willing water supplier.

The same Carrie Lewis who voted at the water committee against an effort to broaden the foundation of its study, and to take into wider issues that moving water around the region might effect.

The committee's focus is supply and demand, and fitting its final recommendations into SEWRPC's existing land use plan - - a plan that has existed for decades as the suburbs grew, Milwaukee declined, affordable housing was ignored, highways were expanded, open land was paved and developed, transit atrophied, and minority employment collapsed.

In order to fully recognize the value of water to communities eager to buy it from Milwaukee, sellers and recipients absolutely have to add two more parameters to that supply/demand equation after conservation standards and other legal requirements are met.

They first have to agree that payment for water will include a share of the development improvements in the buying communities linked in any way to new and reliable supplies of water.

Second parameter:

If water is to be shared regionally, then so do solutions to the region's systemic problems that have been heaped disproportionately into Milwaukee - - the city that now has the water access, the treatment facilities (best in the country) and the pumps and the pipes to get it to the wanting communities.

The principle in water sales negotiations should be:

You can't have one without the other, because water - - if its transfer meets all the legal criteria - - and an agreement to move some of it - - are too precious to waste.

Subdivisions, malls, office complexes, hotels, golf courses, water parks, hospitals, and factories will be attracted to, improved and retained in the outlying communities if and when pipelines are built from Milwaukee.

You can see and hear the ads already:

"Buy Your New Home In Gushing Springs, Supplied With Lake Michigan Water..."Bring The Kids To Diversion World, With Waukesha County's Biggest Water Slide!...Get Rid Of That Water Softener And Build Yourself A Backyard Pool: We're Hooked Up To The Lake Now."

A decent percentage of that new development beyond the Great Lakes basin will include business relocation from Milwaukee, too.

Water will follow the capital, and vice-versa, so the buyer and seller need to figure out how to share the benefits and make them work for both parties, since we're all in the same region.

Look at it like this.

You sell your business. The buyer purchases the fixed assets, both sides of the ledgers, and a calculation for good will/future earnings.

You know - - the business's real, or total, value.

The same goes for Lake Michigan water.

The water will add value to the buying communities.

A group of economists, planners, and politicians should be able to negotiate a fair formula, and then a fair calculation - - as a floor.

And opening access to that water needs to also open discussions and produce new approaches to help remedy all the disparities between city and suburb - - not just the disparity between whose got Lake Michigan water and who doesn't.

Anything less would undervalue the water.

And please don't get all huffy about this, the way State Sen. Mary Lazich, (R-New Berlin) or others have done, calling a proposal like this for some sort of tax-base sharing, or water-based policymaking "extortion," or hatred for the suburbs.

That's bunk, and rhetoric, and they know it.

Don't be diverted from the real issue, which is to make a genuine effort to conserve water, then fully falue and utilize if it is legally moved.

And to recognize the opportunities that water sales can play to address a wider range of issues to boost the entire region, broadly defined: housing availability, balanced transportation, land use protections, water conservation, and more fully open municipal borders.

Given the growing scarcity of water nationally and worldwide, an honest effort to establish the full economic and social value of water in the Great Lakes region would send a message that we take our roles as water stewards seriously.

And understand that water, a life-giving necessity, should be used to add value to everyone's life.