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10/6/2006 Water Quality Crunch for Waukesha Communities In the Making for Years, Decades Even By James Rowen The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com. The city of New Berlin is twisting itself in regulatory and bureaucratic knots to meet a Dec. 8 federal deadline and supply all its customers with water that has had naturally occuring radium removed. But an August letter from the EPA shows the city first exceeded a federal radium standard 23 years ago, giving it plenty of time to avoid the now-looming deadline. Though it signed a consent decree in January 2004 to meet a radium-removal deadline within 34 months (by Dec. 8 of this year), New Berlin has said it will miss the deadline in part because it doesn't want to spend about $4 million on the necessary equipment. Instead, it hired the consulting firm of Ruekert/Mielke to work with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and convince the other seven Great Lakes states to allow a diversion of water from Lake Michigan to that portion of New Berlin that lies outside of the Great Lakes basin. Obtaining Lake Michigan water would help New Berlin meet the deadline, but also raises a predictable host of known problems and barriers. Additionally, the governor of Michigan preliminarily blocked the diversion in June -- Michigan has a history of blocking such applications, fearing the setting of precedents and facilitating bigger withdrawals that would cause more stress to the Great Lakes and a loss in their finite volume. Nevertheless, New Berlin and the DNR are still promoting the application while studying other ways that New Berlin can meet the compliance deadline. All the publicity and activity makes it appear that New Berlin is facing a unforeseen crisis, but in reality, New Berlin had years, even decades, to meet the standard. How many years? Thirty, records show -- and standards and the Dec. 8 compliance deadline have also been known and are not yet met by other fast-growing Waukesha County communities -- the city of Waukesha being the largest. The long history of the radium standard and compliance deadline is detailed in an Aug. 10, 2006 letter from the Chicago regional office of the United States Environmental Protection Agency to New Berlin Mayor Jack Chiovatero. Obtained from New Berlin through an open records request, the letter is from Bharat Mathur, the EPA's acting regional administrator, and is the agency's reply to New Berlin's "requesting assistance in obtaining relief" from the 2004 radium compliance consent agreement New Berlin had signed. The federal standard for "radium maximum contaminant level" in drinking water -- 5 picoCuries per liter -- was established in by the EPA in 1976 and was first exceeded by New Berlin on August 23, 1983 "with a level of 6.6," according to Mathur. So the standard was set 30 years ago, and first documented to be violated in New Berlin 23 years ago. The standard was reviewed over time by state and federal officials, Mathur recounts, and re-affirmed in 2000. That's six years ago. New Berlin consented on January 21, 2004 to meet the radium standard by December 8, 2006, Mathur says. New Berlin has options, Mathur says, including diversion applications that he acknowledges (as New Berlin discovered) come with difficulties. He also indicated that there were possible federal loans to help the city with compliance expenses, but he made it clear that radium-removal equipment was a good route to follow to compliance because it "will improve the quality of drinking water and better protect the health of citizens of New Berlin." The EPA noted that New Berlin's stance was one of "non-compliance with the [federal standard]," and that the consent decree should be met. "I continue to support the terms and milestones agree to in the 2004 consent decree order," Mathur said. So the clock is ticking, with about two months remaining. But the communities that need to meet the 1976 standard deadline have known for years that Dec. 8 loomed and not done enough to meet the standard, leading to the current situation: a hard-to-achieve, last-minute scramble. -- Rowen is a Milwaukee writer and consultant and former Milwaukee city official. | Advertisements
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