Journal Sentinel Still Focused On Great Lakes, While Concern Drops Off Elsewhere

Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel continues his relentless coverage of the Great Lakes with a major Sunday piece.

It's another reminder that the Great Lakes, despite their size, remain at risk, and the Great Lakes states are demanding that the feds shut off access to invasive fish that are demolishing the native species.

Inaction and inertia keep what is the world's largest supply of surface fresh water- - and the entire region's signature resource - - in a state of degradation.

But some of the states lack the political will to do their fair share too, so the finger-pointing at Washington goes only so far.

It is Illinois that willfully fails to physically protect Lake Michigan by blocking off river routes from the south that will likely allow the voracious Asian carp to enter Lake Michigan.

And while the states did pass the Great Lakes Compact of 2008 - - an agreement to establish basic conservation standards and rules to limit diversions of water outside the Great Lakes basin - -there has been uneven activity with respect to adopting companion bills to implement the Compact.

[Note: an earlier version of this posting did not accurately reflect the activity in some of the states]

Wisconsin has passed a strong companion enabling bill to further define how the Compact will be implemented. And some administrative rules have been approved, too, putting Wisconsin ahead of the pack.

Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania have approved bills, but not necessarily with the same breadth or finality.

Minnesota and Illinois say they are relying on existing procedures, and Ohio and New York are still reviewing implementation proposals.

It's a mixed bag and incomplete process overall, for sure - - two years after the Compact itself was approved.

It's not good that  there is this much uncertainty as the first out-of-basin diversion application requiring a mandatory, eight-state review under the 2008 Compact is looming - - should the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources move the Waukesha application along.

Waukesha wants to spend a preliminarily-estimated $164 million to pipe in Lake Michigan water from the City of Milwaukee and discharge its treated wastewater into Underwood Creek in Wauwatosa - - a plan that has raised environmental and land-use questions regionally, and financial and political questions within Waukesha itself, including some posed by the city's Mayor, Jeff Scrima, elected in April after the Common Council approved the Lake Michigan plan.

More details here.

Acknowledging deficiencies in the application, the DNR is still telling Waukesha four months after receiving it that the application remains incomplete; a full-fledged DNR review under Wisconsin's Compact enabling law could last a year if and when it really gets rolling, but the other Great Lakes states would do well to use 2011 to get their laws on their books.

The application needs approvals from all eight Great Lakes states governors, with input from two Canadian provinces, before Waukesha can implement it.

The diversion review and permission process is clearly cumbersome, complex, untested and unpredictable.

It would be somewhere between ironic and insane for Waukesha, the State of Wisconsin, concerned citizens and organizations across an eight state region to invest time and money in the precedent-setting diversion application from Waukesha only to have it delayed further or denied by one or more states because they didn't have their own review procedures and enabling laws in place, or were too busy writing them to be concerned with an application from one faraway medium-sized Wisconsin city.