DNR quietly gave Pleasant Prairie big water increase
Agency’s 2010 decision could prompt legal scrutiny
Wisconsin officials in 2010 quietly approved a massive new allotment of water from Lake Michigan to fast-growing Pleasant Prairie in Kenosha County without extensive public reviews required in other Great Lakes water diversions in recent years.
The action in the final year of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration, gave the bustling community on the Illinois border the right to tap millions of gallons more water a day in the years and decades to come.
The water will go to areas of the village, such as those along the I-94 corridor, that lie outside the Lake Michigan basin and long have struggled with radium and diminishing groundwater supplies.
A bigger supply of water for Pleasant Prairie flew under the radar for years.
Now, the state Department of Natural Resources’ decision is raising questions of transparency and could prompt legal scrutiny.
The details are highlighted in an updated book, “The Great Lakes
“It’s a pretty significant marketing advantage.” David Strifling, director of Marquette University Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative
Water Wars,” by journalist Peter Annin, who writes of the growing tensions over water use in and around the basin of the lakes.
The official re-release of the book is Oct. 3 to mark the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Great Lakes Compact — the landmark 2008 law that bans water diversions outside the basin in most cases.
The DNR told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the agency was following Wisconsin law when officials unilaterally increased the upper limit of water available for Pleasant Prairie from 3.2 million gallons a day to 10.69 million gallons a day. All the water taken has to be returned to the lake.
That additional 7.49 million gallons is nearly as much as the 8.2 million gallons a day that Great Lakes Compact council members granted, after close scrutiny, to the City of Waukesha in 2016.
Pleasant Prairie isn’t using that water yet. Last year, its average daily diversion of Lake Michigan water was 2.49 million gallons a day, according to DNR figures.
But the village’s location at the edge of the Chicago metroplex, and 20 minutes from Foxconn Technology Group’s industrial complex now under development, gives it a strategic edge.
“To me, it’s a pretty significant marketing advantage — an economic advantage for them,” said David Strifling, director of Marquette University Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative.
Strifling said he sees the matter as “something more for the court of public opinion at this point — should the DNR have done something to be more transparent about it?”
Todd Ambs, the DNR water division administrator for much of the time the agency was working on the Pleasant Prairie case, said he was never told by staff that the village would be in line for a major increase in water from Lake Michigan.
He said he now wonders whether the matter was an “innocuous updating of a permit” and that the significance of the action was not fully understood.
Ambs said he would have pressed for more openness.
Other states, especially Michigan, were concerned about Pleasant Prairie’s initial bid for 3.2 million gallons of Lake Michigan water a day, which was granted in 1989 by Great Lakes states under the Water Resources Development Act, a law that was the precursor to the compact.
“I don’t know why we wouldn’t have told the world about the Pleasant Prairie thing ...,” said Ambs, currently director of Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
In an interview, Annin said without public notification, no one knows the village has the largest permitted water diversion in Wisconsin history.
“I don’t think it was envisioned that states would unilaterally increase water diversions by millions of gallons a day and not announce it publicly,” Annin said.
Molly Flanagan, vice president of policy for the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes, said lawyers for the organization are evaluating the Pleasant Prairie case for potential violations of the compact.
“I do think this is an example of Wisconsin playing fast and loose with the compact’s provisions, she said.
According to DNR officials, the agency was complying with state law in giving the larger volume of water to Pleasant Prairie.
Wisconsin law requires a community’s water delivery system eventually to serve the same area as its sewer service area. Sewer service areas are planned to accommodate future development and population growth.
So the state concluded it had the authority to proceed when it filed a report with the regional compact council on water diversions like Pleasant Prairie’s that took place before the compact was adopted.
“Neither the compact nor Wisconsin’s implementing statute required public hearings for any grandfathered diversion approvals,” Adam T. Freihoefer, water use section chief for the DNR, said in an email.
Marquette’s Strifling said the DNR saw itself as fulfilling its legal obligation.
“But it’s surprising that with the size of the increase, it was sort of filed as a matter of paperwork,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t widely known — and that’s the rub.”
Peter Annin will discuss “The Great Lakes Water Wars” from 5 to 7 p.m. Oct. 3 at Discovery World, 500 N. Harbor Drive.