Waukesha activist seeks further PSC review of water diversion plan

We're about to learn whether Wisconsin still will allow a single citizen to take on several levels of government to which that citizen pays the taxes or fees that underwrite the whole citizen-government democratic compact.

Former Waukesha school board member and water policy activist Steven Edlund has filed a petition with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission that formally asks the PSC to grant him the status challenge arrangements between Waukesha and New Berlin that will facilitate the distribution of a precedent-setting diversion of water out of the Great Lakes basin from Lake Michigan 
 
through the City of Milwaukee Water Works.

Those arrangements and some of the issue's complex history were extensively  recounted in a Waukesha environmental newsletter, (begin on p. 7): 

Edlund and other Waukesha County residents have been objecting to the project's rising estimated cost and the water data and assumptions behind it for years:

The city claimed the groundwater table was dropping as much as 5 to 7 feet each year. Based on U.S. Geological Survey monitoring data and Water Utility well reports, the deep aquifer stopped declining around the year 2000 and has now risen to levels not seen since the 1980s.

Never the less, Waukesha is proceeding with its long-delayed, $286 million diversion plan, having recently received a low-cost federal loan guarantee worth more than $137 for a project which has more than tripled from its initial estimated cost of $78 million:

Big gov't OK's 'crazy' low-cost Federal millions in Waukesha water diversion funding

The precedent-setting $286 million diversion plan has unfolded over years, is far behind schedule and way above initial cost estimates as low as $78 million - some history, here - and only recently cleared yet another hurdle - this time with New Berlin....

It's fashionable on the right to call government spending 'bailouts' or 'socialism' or wasteful, or election-year-incumbency handouts, whatever.

I doubt you will hear any of that from the situational ideologues. 

For the record: I've been writing about the diversion possibility for more than 14 years, here - and that's before I began this blog which has scores of posts about it accessible through key words in the index box at the upper left. 

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