The Midwest Environmental Advocates Wednesday started its push for more water conservation across the state by releasing a 50-page report with recommendations on how to save water.

“We really need to move on it because it will take some time to really get it going,” MEA legal counsel Jodi Habush Sinykin said to a gathering of conservation-minded people in Waukesha. “This is going to be a process, and for it to be effective, we’re going to have to work together with public officials.”

The report, titled Protecting Wisconsin’s Water, suggests changes to some state water regulations and lists ways local governments can encourage conservation. Its final chapter is directed toward the city of Waukesha and offers ideas for its water utility to consider as it drafts a water conservation program.

Sinykin, a co-author of the report, said members of the Waukesha County Board received a copy Wednesday morning. She said legislators in Madison and officials in Brown County and the Milwaukee area would also get copies.

When asked how much political support the report is receiving, Sinykin said there were legislators that were interested but that “at this early onset point, we haven’t gotten to the level where we move forward with personal meetings.”

Development not thwarted

The MEA report doesn’t suggest restricting new developments but says local governments should preserve recharge areas—land where rain can easily soak into the groundwater system. It proposes changing state annexation laws to protect recharge areas from being annexed by municipalities for development.

“If annexation is driven solely by developers without input from public policy officials and science, that makes it more problematic,” she said. “The land-use policies of communities have to be intelligent. They have to take into account the local resources.”

The MEA report suggests communities explore reusing or recycling water in the sewerage systems after it is purified but said the idea would require new infrastructure to be built and some hefty price tags.

The MEA also made eight suggestions to the Waukesha Water Utility, which is in the process of drafting and testing numerous approaches to water conservation. It suggests the city ask for Public Service Commission of Wisconsin approval to charge customers higher water rates the more water they use. It also suggests reusing water, placing some restrictions on watering lawns, auditing large industrial water users to find opportunities for conservation and checking the city’s utility pipes for cracks that allow water to leak out.

Waukesha’s efforts

Both Sinykin and Waukesha Water Utility General Manager Dan Duchniak said they’d like to cooperate to draft the city’s conservation plan. Duchniak said the process is already under way. The utility is trying a number of pilot projects on a small scale that it hopes to turn into workable programs that any area business could use.

“We want to have samples and examples of where we’ve worked and what we’ve done so we have some real examples and not just predictions,” Duchniak said.

“We’ve moved forward, we’ve acted on a number of different items and developed a lot of partnerships.”
Duchniak said the effort includes:

* Collaborating with some local developers to find workable sustainable design ideas that will allow rain that falls on new developments to soak into the ground instead of running off into the storm sewers.

* Working with Kohler Co. to audit water use in Waukesha City Hall that can be used to create a conservation program for all city buildings

* Finding ways to reduce runoff on the Waukesha Memorial Hospital grounds. The successful ideas will be used to draft site-runoff reduction programs adaptable to any business location

* Working with local city officials on an ordinance to regulate use of lawn sprinklers.

Duchniak said the water utility wants to filter all of its conservation ideas through the environmental community. He said the suggestions in the MEA report were consistent with what the utility is exploring.

“We’re going to be more than happy to work with them,” he said. “We have made a commitment to bring in the environmental community to review the things that we’re proposing.”