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Conservatively Speaking
State Senator Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) represents parts of four counties: Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine, and Walworth. Her Senate District 28 includes New Berlin, Franklin, Greendale, Hales Corners, Muskego, Waterford, Big Bend and parts of Greenfield, East Troy, and Mukwonago. Senator Lazich has been in the Legislature for more than a decade. She considers herself a tireless crusader for lower taxes, reduced spending and smaller government.
Mayor Tom Barrett’s sudden concern about a Great Lakes issue
By Mary Lazich
Thursday, Sep 25 2008, 04:28 PM
What is going on inside Milwaukee City Hall? It seems Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has suddenly become worried about the fact that Chicago is discharging large amounts of sewer overflow into Lake Michigan.
Last week, Mayor Barrett wrote a letter to U.S. Congressman Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) expressing his concerns about, “the amount of the overflows reported by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago which were estimated at 99 billion gallons” during a strong storm this month. Barrett continues:
“So, in this one September storm alone, Chicago released five times more combined sewage than Milwaukee has released in 14 years. Additionally, Chicago is perhaps the only community that can have overflows that go both east and west into different watersheds (Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River) at the same time. Chicago has dozens of combined sewer overflows every year into the Mississippi basin – the source of drinking water for millions of people. Chicago is also the only city on the Great Lakes that does not disinfect its wastewater.”
I commend Mayor Barrett for writing the letter; however, I have two questions for Mayor Barrett:
1) Where have you been?
Chicago’s dumping of vast amounts of sewage into Lake Michigan should come as no surprise. Historically, Chicago has more or less been able to do whatever it wants about Lake Michigan, regardless of the circumstances or consequences.
Take, for instance, Chicago’s diversion of water from the Great Lakes.
The Illinois-Michigan Canal was opened to shipping traffic in 1848, the same year Wisconsin entered the Union. Every day, 64.6 million gallons of water was diverted from Lake Michigan at Chicago through the Chicago and Illinois Rivers to the Mississippi River.
The Windy City’s sewage poured into the Chicago River and then into Lake Michigan, Chicago’s drinking water source. As a result, in 1885, over 10 percent of Chicago’s population, 90,000 people died from cholera.
Since then, the amount of water in the Chicago diversion has grown substantially, even beyond the limit imposed by a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The Chicago diversion was not only in direct defiance of the high court, but is, today, the largest diversion out of the Great Lakes Basin. The other Great Lakes states voiced concern, leading to a battle in federal court.
Illinois agreed to reduce the outtake of water from Lake Michigan to the amount set by previous court decisions. The other states agreed not to take legal action for previous Illinois violations. What a sweet deal Illinois received. At a time when Wisconsin communities are desperate for water, today, millions of northeast Illinois residents that live outside the Great Lakes Basin have access to Lake Michigan water because of the Chicago diversion.
With that history in mind, I am not surprised at Chicago’s recent dumping of sewage into Lake Michigan.
2) If this so concerns you, Mayor Barrett, why didn’t you raise these issues during the time you so vigorously lobbied for approval of the Great Lakes Compact?
I thought, listening to officials like Mayor Barrett that the Compact was going to resolve these issues, protect our resource, and prohibit the kind of harmful action Chicago took. Throughout the entire process, I never heard Mayor Barrett voice any objections about the questionable Chicago sweet diversion deal or the city’s dumping of sewage into Lake Michigan.
During the lengthy deliberations about the Great Lakes Compact, I made it clear that despite my reservations, I supported an effective document that was good for the Great Lakes, the state of Wisconsin, and would preserve our greatest natural resource.
Time and time again, I heard Compact proponents make the case that the Compact would address the water needs of New Berlin. The conventional wisdom was that the Compact needed to be approved quickly, and if it was, New Berlin’s water woes would be taken care of. Making those arguments were city of Milwaukee officials from Mayor Tom Barrett on down. They claimed the city of Milwaukee would no longer have issues with New Berlin getting water if Wisconsin would simply okay the Compact. City of Milwaukee officials even threatened to withhold the sale of water to New Berlin until the Compact was approved by the Legislature.
What happened? Wisconsin approved the Compact, but for the city of Milwaukee, on this critical public health issue, it remained business as usual, as it imposed a hefty price tag for a community in desperate need of water. For the city of Milwaukee, it was never about the Compact. It was and remains a question of money and control over a suburb to the west.
It appears Tom Barrett, who argued long and hard that the Compact needed to be approved as quickly as possible, and even used precious water as a negotiating chip, believes Congress needs to be aware of a serious problem in the Great Lakes Basin. Maybe Mayor Barrett should have thought about that before his rush to judgment.
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