Waukesha Water Lawyer Predicting End Of Great Lakes Diversions Sounds Clairvoyent

It wasn't long ago that Waukesha Mayor Jeff Scrima told the Waukesha Freeman that Attorney Don Gallo, the city's water law consultant, said the city should move ahead now with the effort to obtain Lake Michigan water because Great Lakes regulators would eventually decide to close off the option when they understood that not all the diverted water could be returned.

You can read the Mayor's interview June 30 here. This is the relevant section:

     "Scrima said he asked Don Gallo, an attorney working with the Waukesha Water Utility, why the city is pushing to receive Lake Michigan water now instead of waiting 30 to 40 years. 

    “What he said to me blew me away,” Scrima said. “He said, ‘The Great Lakes are not sustainable.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, we are only able to return 92 percent of the water because there is 8 percent of consumptive use.’”

   "Scrima said Gallo told him that the Great Lakes governors are going to realize that people will use water to drink, water their lawns and for industry, and as a result will cease approving water diversions under the terms of the Great Lake Compact.

    "The compact requires communities that are beyond the subcontinental divide to treat and return the water to the Great Lakes.

    "However, Gallo said the Great Lakes are sustainable and the water supply is the most reasonable option available to the city. The mayor may have been confused by their discussion, he added. "

Today we learn through the fine reporting of Dan Egan at the Journal Sentinel that officials in charge of the overall levels of the Great Lakes want scientists to look at ways to raise those levels, especially the falling level of Lake Michigan.

In Lake Michigan, the drop is more than 20 inches, and though those levels fluctuate, the trend for Lake Michigan and its sister body of water, Lake Huron is down - - with climate change and dredging of a river near Detroit the probable culprits.

That doesn't sound like good news for any city thinking of asking for a diversion from Lake Michigan - - Waukesha is the first community that is outside the boundaries of the the Great Lakes to have drafted an application under the framework of a 2008 Great Lakes water management and conservation Compact - - because some percentage of the diverted water will be permanently lost.

You bottle, or cook with, that water, or wash your car, or water your lawn with it in the City of Waukesha, or do so anywhere in the bigger-by-80% service territory to the city's west and south envisioned in the application, and that water flows away from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River basin, though Waukesha does plan to capture its wastewater, treat it and and send it back to the Lake via Underwood Creek in Wauwatosa, where, also I assume, some percentage is lost to evaporation.

Other supply problems with the application: Waukesha argues that through ground-water infiltration into its piping, additional water will be returned to the Lake Michigan, but that would be co-mingled return flow using a different, non-Great Lake source.

A brighter red flag: Waukesha intends to completely shut off the Lake Michigan return flow during heavy rains so as not to flood Underwood Creek, but to claim full compliance with the return flow requirements in the Compact using calculations as averages over five years.

Problem is - - the Compact does not endorse such averaging.

These are issues that are probably not going to sit well with diversion application reviewers from Minnesota to Madison to Michigan to New York State, as all eight Great Lakes states must approve a diversion-and-return plan by a community like Waukesha that sits entirely outside of the Great Lakes basin.