Milwaukee Suburb Allowed Unprecedented Water Diversion from Lake Michigan

"A suburban Milwaukee city won a hard-fought battle Tuesday to draw its drinking water from Lake Michigan," reports the Chicago Tribune news service. The decision is "a key test of a regional compact designed to safeguard the Great Lakes region's abundant but vulnerable fresh water supply," according to the article.

Waukesha was the first city to make use of a provision in the 2008 Great Lakes Compact that allows communities just outside the Great lakes watershed to request diversions of water outside the watershed. Waukesha proposed the $207 million diversion project after discovering that "groundwater wells on which the city has long relied are contaminated with radium." Waukesha will now be allowed to pump 8.2 million gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan.

According to a separate article by Dan Kraker:

A panel of representatives from the eight Great Lakes states (plus two Canadian provinces) gave the plan tentative approval in May. But it required Waukesha to reduce the amount of water it would withdraw daily from 10.1 million gallons to 8.2 million gallons, and to shrink the size of the area it would provide with water to 57 percent of the original proposal.

The controversial proposal attracted plenty of opposition over the years, including when Planetizen first picked it up in January 2011. In September 2015, several local newspapers raised concerns about the end of the project's trail, when Waukesha will pumps treated wastewater back into Lake Michigan. As recently as May, the decision to cut the daily volume and delivery area of the project prompted a discussion about growth in the suburban area of Waukesha.