Waukesha’s newly elected mayor, Shawn Reilly, plans to move forward with the city’s water diversion application as it’s written.
The municipal attorney wants to keep the application, started in 2010 by predecessor Jeff Scrima, the Common Council and the Waukesha Water Utility Commission, moving through the long approval process.
“I don’t have any intention of modifying it or changing it,” Reilly said. “It’s taken a very long time to get to this point. I don’t want to delay the process.”
Waukesha’s water supply is contaminated with a high level of radium, a naturally occurring but carcinogenic element. The city is under pressure because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered it to bring its drinking water up to safe standards by 2018.
Under the 2008 Great Lakes Compact, cities that are located outside the Great Lakes basin but are within counties, like Waukesha, that straddle the edge of the basin, can apply for access to Great Lakes water. They must agree to return treated wastewater to the Great Lakes, and the water diversion must be approved by the governors of all of the eight Great Lakes states.
This is the first time a city outside the basin has applied for diversion, so Waukesha is serving as a pioneer in the process, and now Reilly will be leading that charge.
“The whole compact was put together in order to protect the Great Lakes,” Reilly said. “It provided for straddling communities, which is what Waukesha is, to obtain water under the compact if they met certain conditions. It’s my belief that we meet those conditions and if the governors of the other states refuse to approve an application that meets the conditions, arguably it can put the entire compact in jeopardy.”
After an initial rejection from the state Department of Natural Resources in 2010 and a drawn out battle with the City of Milwaukee over diverting its water supply, Waukesha submitted an amended application in October, with water being diverted from Oak Creek. The city is now waiting on the DNR to issue a technical review and an environmental impact statement based on its application.
Right now, the DNR has no estimate of when those draft documents will be available, said Eric Ebersberger, water use section chief for the DNR.
“We’ve got a lot of information to pore through and we’ve been speaking with the applicant on a number of different areas and coordinating staff internally,” Ebersberger said. “We’re still working through the application and the environmental impact report, and I would hope that in about a month or so, I would be in a much better position to speculate on a timeline.”
After the draft documents are released, there will be a 45 day public comment period, and then the final environmental impact statement and technical review will be released, he said.
“At that point, if we find it to be approvable … it’s at that point that we would forward it to the other states and then there’s another process that would kick in once it’s forwarded to the other states,” Ebersberger said.
As for a plan B if the application is rejected, Reilly said he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
“At this point, I’m of the position that what’s in the application should stay in the application,” Reilly said. “If the DNR brings something back to the city, then I would look at it.”
He also stressed that it’s a group decision among the Water Utility Commission, Common Council and himself.
Reilly said he’s not concerned about critics’ claims that rural areas included in the service area in Waukesha’s application have other viable alternative water supplies.
“It’s not uncommon for sanitary service areas and water service areas to have land that may be developed under alternative water sources, but we’re looking at the long-term here, not just what’s going to happen in the short term,” he said. “It is understood that there may be areas where homes are serviced by private wells. The focus, though, is on what the service area will be many years from now.”
The new mayor’s legal experience may come in handy as the process continues to move forward. He’s helped two municipalities site wells located outside village limits.
“I have a lot of expertise just knowing how wells operate and what’s needed to put them in place … and how adjacent municipalities view those issues,” Reilly said. “I’m well versed in the law regarding use of the waters of the State of Wisconsin, be it surface or underground.”
Oak Creek Mayor Steve Scaffidi said the specifics of a water diversion from Oak Creek to Waukesha have yet to be worked out. That task will likely fall to Reilly once the DNR issues its decision.
After Milwaukee rejected Waukesha’s diversion proposal, Oak Creek stepped in because it sells water, with no restrictions on who the customers are.
“It was a business decision for us based on the fact that our water utility has excess capacity,” Scaffidi said. “We’re in the business of selling water.”
