WATER

Lake Michigan is the Prime Natural Asset that Highland Park has within its boundaries. There is no doubt of the importance it has to us as well as life itself. Most of us take the fresh body of water for granted.... but we should not. Remember, this lake water compromises 70% of our bodies. Yes, 70% of US is Lake Michigan.

We need to protect the lake and understand the fundamental requirements to do so. The Great Lakes ecosystem has limits of tolerance that can't be ignored. Proactive decisions and policies need to be thought out and enacted to assure its survival and ours. Short sided public policy and industrial decisions must not be allowed to continue for our children, and children's children to be able to survive on this earth.

The Great Lakes Compact, passed into federal law in 2008 and signed onto by the State of Illinois, prohibits water diversions outside of the watershed and ensures that the waters are used sustainably within the watershed. Actions by our Lake County leaders and affirmed by the state do not seem to follow this commitment since they have suggested we pump new Lake Michigan water outside the watershed. Along with breaking the rule on this compact, there is no plans to bring the water back into the watershed to replace its diversion. This proposal by Lake County is morally vacant of any reasonable stewardship of our Great Lakes resource and possibly violates the Compact that we did sign.

On another front we are spending over 30 million dollars at our Highland Park water plant to increase capacity from about 21 MGD (million gal. per day) to 30 MGD. To be fair to my colleague Jim Kirsch, a major promoter of this expansion, this new micro filtration process does remove smaller elements in the process making it marginally safer. The micro filtration process also significantly increases the amount of energy to operate the plant over our current sand filtration system. The plans also make it possible to produce 40 MGD with future modifications. Currently, Highland Park and the western communities we serve use about 11 MGD with peaks in the summer over the 21 MGD. So there are two major reasons proponents have pushed this project forward over the past 5 years. One is increased capacity and the other is cleaner water. My concern and objection to moving forward over the past several years is that we do not need increased capacity (we could enact a conservation policy and reduce consumption significantly, thus fall well within the current operation capacity during peaks) and currently we exceed all the federal and state requirements for clean drinkable water.

At our last City Council meeting Councilman David Naftzger made a motion to postpone two items on our agenda to immediately spend over a million more on this project until we had time to dig into the policy changes this Council has embraced, and its effects on this expansion plan. Only Councilman Naftzger and myself supported that postponement. After urging an pleading from our city manager, the Mayor and 3 others voted to spend the million plus and push forward on the 30+ million spending plan without additional investigation or discussion. 

Councilman Naftzger and myself will push forward on clarifying the facts on NEED and the resulting economic impact these decisions will have on our water rates as we borrow the 30+ million dollars future residents will have to pay back. While most might say this horse is way out of the barn, I believe we can reduce the scope of this project and save many millions, move forward with a cutting edge conservation plan, and reduce the economic burden that these costs will impact residents for the next 25 years. My hope is to turn this LEMON into lemonade we can all support.