“Here are some of the questions people danced around: Is Great Lakes water the trump card? If the suburbs can’t access the water, will their stunted growth stop forcing business and people out of the City of Milwaukee? ”

Art Hackett Producer Journal

“Great Lakes Compact” Shoot

This is a story I’ve been following since 1985 when then-Wisconsin Gov. Anthony Earl signed the Great Lakes Annex. You can see a copy of the segment I filed for Wisconsin Magazine, the show I was working on at the time. [Watch Real or Windows clip.]

Watch Producer Art Hackett's extra segments:

» Not a Drop to Drink
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» Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett comments on how the city manages water in Lake Michigan
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» Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson’s comments on how the city manages water in Lake Michigan
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That was a much bigger deal than the updated compact signed in 2006. More governors were there (including Mario Cuomo of New York) and more Canadian premiers.

At that time, the big fear was exporting Great Lakes water to the Southwest. As we reported in the 1985 segment, studies by several federal agencies had already said moving water that distance was not economically feasible regardless of whether it was legal.

Today, the fear is exporting water just past the sub-continental divide to suburban communities.

Then we did the segment that aired in 2006. The elephant in the room that people were trying to ignore was the issue of suburban sprawl and the economic competition between older cities like Milwaukee and suburban areas like Waukesha County.

Under the 1985 agreement Waukesha, which wants Lake Michigan water because its well water is contaminated with radium, is pretty much out of luck. If you’re outside the Great Lakes basin, you can’t have Great Lakes water. The updated compact gives counties that straddle the basin boundaries permission to use the water if they follow certain rules. Complying with those rules may be difficult and expensive but they at least provide a set of instructions to follow if you want to do it.

To interpret those instructions you need to understand groundwater flows. Hydrogeology is complicated. If you want to find out more about this, the UW Geological and Natural History Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey have prepared a model of groundwater flows in southeast Wisconsin. You can read about it here.

But there is a second story here. That story involves something other than water. It involves economic development’s winners and losers.

Here are some of the questions people danced around: Is Great Lakes water the trump card? If the suburbs can’t access the water, will their stunted growth stop forcing business and people out of the City of Milwaukee?

Or: Is suburban development inevitable? Will Waukesha County keep heading west towards Madison, sinking wells as development continues? That is legal since it’s all in the same water basin. Whether it’s good environmental policy or not is another matter. Some of the development is on land that recharges the aquifer from which Waukesha now draws water.

And thousands of years from now, that water will wind up in the Great Lakes.

We interviewed Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson for the segment and talked about the growth and sprawl implications of the debate over the compact.

Unfortunately, only a small piece of the footage made it into the segment.

You can see expanded versions of the interviews with Mayors Barrett [Watch Real or Windows clip] and Nelson here [Watch Real or Windows clip.]

“Turbines” Shoot

This wasn’t an easy story to do since it involves something that’s only a gleam in someone’s eye at this point.

There isn’t even a proposal to put x number of turbines x miles from some city. What we report on is individuals who are talking up the potential of the Great Lakes as a site for wind turbines.

Offshore wind farms are being built in Europe today so the technology isn’t the problem. The problem here is that there are too many undeveloped sites on shore where utilities know they can locate turbines and make money. They locate wind farms on land without getting into the relative unknowns of offshore projects.

What struck me about the people we met in this story is that they are like the pioneers. They do everything.

The guy who is gathering wind data off the Port of Racine, Wis. went out to a former lighthouse platform and installed the equipment himself. He had to don ear protection since there’s a fog horn on the platform that gives off deafening blasts every couple of minutes.

The meteorologist who wanted to know what speed the wind was blowing at a higher altitude built a kite to get the measuring equipment up where he wanted it.

They are not, however, just wild-eyed dreamers. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is gearing up to process applications for offshore wind farms. The department’s assumption is that someone’s application will be in its mailbox in the not-too-distant future.

“Fish Cleaner” Shoot

This was a story found on the way to covering another story. We went to Algoma to cover reaction to offshore wind turbines. No one is proposing to build them near Algoma. Another reporter just happened to pick Algoma to ask the, “What would you think?” question.

We were following up on that when the alderman we were interviewing gave us the impression that while he was happy to talk about wind turbines, he REALLY wanted to show us his city’s new pride and joy: A truly deluxe fish-cleaning station.

You have to see it to appreciate it. And if you catch fish near Algoma, you will appreciate it even more.

But for non-fishers, it is a demonstration of the complex web spanning the lake’s resources, the people nearby, and the local infrastructure. It shows how local ingenuity can solve a problem simply and relatively cheaply.