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Losing Control?

“If we want sunshine, we’ll move to Arizona. If they want water, let them move to Michigan.” – George Kuper, President of the Council of Great Lakes Industries, in the USA Today, December 2006

For decades great hordes of people have fled the chill of the upper Midwest for the sunshine of the southwest, content to watch their home teams via satellite and stay connected with their roots by telephone and email. But now, to an ever-growing degree, they are beginning to look back in envy at their old hometowns, desperate for the resource once taken for granted.

The faucets of the sun-baked southwest states are drying up, and decades of efforts to make a largely uninhabitable climate artificially livable are coming to their inevitable conclusion. If great numbers of people are going to try to maintain a northeast and Midwest lifestyle in the desert, they’ll eventually need to import the resources of those regions, the most precious of which is the water of the Great Lakes.

Democratic Presidential candidate and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has done little to veil his designs on the lakes. He has said he would elevate water to a cabinet level position, a wise idea in itself.

“We have a bunch of states and urban and rural areas fighting over water,” he said in August at a campaign stop, according to Arizona’s Mason Valley News. “We need national strategies.”

Richardson raised the idea of water compacts between water rich and water poor states.

“Water producing states like Wisconsin with western states like New Mexico and Nevada maybe can develop some compacts, new relationships involving water availability…There should be no reason there should be a fight over water, when we’re all in it together, when we should have some kind of mediation and sharing of water,” Richardson said.

The candidate and others with similar ideas would like to see the Great Lakes states forced by the federal government to subsidize those who choose to move to regions where there is no water. He has made no proposals, however, to send any heat or sunshine back to the Midwest in trade.

In response to the increased volume of such rhetoric, the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters (WLCV) is making a statewide push to drum up support for a stronger version of the Great Lakes Basin Compact. Ann Sayers is a conservationist with the five year-old organization and said Wisconsinites should be concerned.

“We’re out talking now because the language now is so alarming,” Sayers said.

The present Great Lakes Compact took five years to develop and was finished in December of 2005. Effort to protect the lakes began in earnest in 1999 when a Canadian company proposed shipping water in tankers from Lake Ontario to Asia. To go into effect, all eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the president have to sign it. Only two states, Minnesota and Illinois, have passed legislation thus far, but Wisconsin is the only state without legislation even under consideration.

Sayers said such negligence is dangerous for a state with so much to lose if the lakes continue to deteriorate. Invasive species, diversions, and withdrawals have brought Lake Michigan to a perilous crossroads where the fishing industry is suffering and lake levels are dropping uncommonly quickly.

The once-pristine shores of Door County, whose sand beaches have attracted tourists for a century, are now layered in weeds and cladophora, and its $420 million tourist industry would be threatened by further deterioration.

The league has joined with several other environmental organizations in a coalition seeking what they call a Strong Compact for a Strong Wisconsin, a more stringent version of the baseline compact.

The coalition’s Platform for a Strong Great Lakes Compact includes the following protective requirements:

• Closing a loophole that would allow the extraction of bottled water from the Great Lakes without review

• Requiring stronger water conservation measures

• Setting environmentally responsible standards governing the use of rivers for purposes of returning water – pumped out of the basin – back to the Great Lakes

• Maintaining the integrity of the Great Lakes basin boundary by limiting annexation by communities

• Assuring public participation and expanding public enforcement options

• Requiring thresholds and monitoring for large in-basin water users

Sayers said the strong compact is necessary at a time when Lake Huron, Michigan, and Superior are all at historic lows and invasive species are drastically altering the ecological makeup of the world’s largest bodies of fresh water. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine the lakes being drained by all manner of diversions and withdrawals.

“In 1981 Wyoming proposed a pipeline to Lake Superior,” she said. “In 1980 the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a pipeline from Lake Michigan to the Ogallala Aquifer in Oklahoma. A University of Alabama professor recently suggested the federal government subsidize a pipeline to Birmingham, and Bill Richardson proposes the water rich states help offset shortages throughout the United States.”

With water shortages becoming more acute and populations skyrocketing in the west, the thirst is only growing.

Jessica Garrels works with Sayers in the Green Bay branch of the WLCV and said there is a growing urgency to the effort spurred by the 2011 census, when it’s expected a large rise in the population of the southwest will be accompanied by a decline in the population of the Great Lakes Region. This would result in greater representation in congress by the water starved southwestern states and a loss by the water rich Great Lakes.

What the coalition fears is that without a compact in place the federal government might step in and set the rules for them.

“It’s vital we retain regional control of the lakes,” Sayers said.

Door County’s representative in the State Assembly, Garey Bies (Rep., Sister Bay) said the compact is on his radar. Sayers praised the assemblyman’s recent comments about the importance of the lakes in lobbying for passage of his legislation concerning phosphorus usage, and Bies said he recognizes the need for action.

“Wisconsin’s in a difficult position,” he said. “People are eyeing up our water. I know other legislatures are putting something together and I have offered my assistance. I want to take a look at the language.”

The assemblyman is concerned about language in the compact, particularly a provision allowing citizens to sue government agencies over alleged violations. He said it was easy to pass in Minnesota because they have so little shoreline, and in Illinois because “they already have their diversions in place.” Bies met with Sayers recently and was impressed with the organization’s efforts.

“I’d be very happy to work with her and we discussed the possibility I could be a lead author of any legislation in the assembly,” he said.

“We need to do something in the next year or two,” Bies said. “Beyond that we’re going to get in trouble. My goal is to get something produced by the end of the legislative session in April.”

So why is Wisconsin, whose economy is highly dependent on Lake Michigan, lagging behind in protecting our most important resource?

The lines in the battle over the compact are drawn along geography rather than politics. Within the state, Bies and Sayers say Waukesha, the state’s wealthiest community, appears to be the heart of opposition to the compact. Waukesha lies outside the Great Lakes Basin and would be subject to strict review of any withdrawals.

Some fear giving up sovereign rights to state-owned water by agreeing to be part of a regional water board, while manufacturing interests oppose the effort as well, as it would more strictly regulate withdrawals and water quality management.

With three important swing states bordering the Great Lakes – Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan – and the needs of several high-population southwest states growing, regulation of the lakes’ water could become a major issue in the 2008 presidential race.

“I can’t imagine Richardson’s quote wooing Wisconsin voters,” Garrels said.

Sayers and Garrels said the people of Door County see the deteriorating shoreline and grasp the seriousness of the issue. Garrels came to Sister Bay’s Marina Fest over Labor Day to collect public comment and in two hours collected 160 comments.

“People up here see how much the lakes mean,” she said. “It’s a gut reaction and that’s great to see.”

In short, the compact would set stricter standards for communities outside the Great Lakes Basin, for withdrawing and diverting water, and for vessels using the lakes.

“The ultimate goal is to make sure states and countries don’t take our water,” Sayers said.