Tapping The Great Lakes, a documentary from Detroit Public TV and Great Lakes Now released in March 2018, offers a bit of perspective by juxtaposing Wisconsin’s water controversies with another in Michigan related to bottled-water operations.
Michigan-based environmental activists including Jim Olson and Peggy Case speak in Tapping The Great Lakes about how, in the 18 contentious years Nestlé has been pumping water in the state (something it had initially hoped to do in Wisconsin), surface waters near the company’s wells have changed.
Each Party shall have the discretion, within its jurisdiction, to determine the treatment of Proposals to Withdraw Water and to remove it from the Basin in any container of 5.7 gallons or less.” Given this rule, if Nestlé or another business wants to sell water sourced within the Great Lakes Basin in small bottles, it’s largely an individual state’s decision whether or not to allow it.
When the city of Waukesha sought to tap Lake Michigan for its drinking water supply, though, it took the unanimous approval of the governors of all eight Great Lakes states, in their capacity as the Great Lakes Compact Council.
That’s because the city isn’t in the Basin at all, but is within Waukesha County, which straddles its boundary.
Waukesha argued that the radium tainting its groundwater and the depletion of its groundwater supply (which in turn made the contamination worse) left it with no other option.
What happens with more Waukeshas, more Nestlés, more industrial users like Foxconn?
Michigan U.S. Rep Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, said in Tapping The Great Lakes that Waukesha started out claiming that it needed Lake Michigan water because of radium contamination, not because of the depletion of those groundwater reserves.
In 2010, Waukesha asked to use 10.9 million gallons per day — far more than it’s using in 2018 — then walked their request back to 8.2 million gallons per day and proposed using it in a smaller service area.
Do the Compact and state and federal laws make it too easy for businesses and certain communities to misuse a resource that belongs to the people of the Great Lakes Basin?