Lake Michigan

In a posting Sunday, I noted the insufficiency of the SEWRPC water study and regional water supply scheme because these two linked ideas and goals leave out all the other major elements of comprehensive planning - - transit, housing and jobs.

SEWRPC is the Pewaukee-based Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, a suburban/exurban-dominated public agency on which the City of Milwaukee has no seats and votes, and on which the four least-populated of SEWRPC's seven counties can be a voting majority.

Ironically, just two days earlier, the Journal Sentinel editorial board crafted a profound, one-paragraph summation of the region's comprehensive planning needs in the context of the recession recovery.

Here is that editorial, and the specific graph, which I have set off in boldface:

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You remember "Chinatown," right - - the 1974 film classic about diverting the Los Angeles city water supply to nearby land where there was development and money to be had?

Who knows how closely life will imitate art when the City of Waukesha files its formal application for a diversion of Lake Michigan water - - a process presumably devoid of the Chinatownesque secrecy that accompanied an earlier effort by Waukesha to get a 24-million-gallon-per-day diversion permission from state officials?

And will Waukesha acquire water for itself, or will it bring in other municipalities, or will SEWRPC use the application and its recently-concluded regional water supply study to recommend the creation of a water authority to help expand diversions where over-pumping and over-development has enhanced demand?

Sensors and gauges and computers can track the environmental impact of waters' movements, but how closely and broadly will the political and financial course that diverted water and its return flow regime takes be monitored, analyzed and corrected?

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The far-right will tell us the sky will fall, and West Coast capitalism is doomed, but even in a tough economy the State of California has done the right thing instituting a broad set of new rules - - including a carbon emission cap-and-trade incentive system - - designed to aggressively combat air pollution and climate change.

Given the density of people and traffic in southern California, the new rules are completely logical, and I'd expect and hope that there is political carryover to other parts of the US, and to the Congress and Obama administration, as a result.

Which brings us to Wisconsin, where some modest greenhouse gas controls and energy alternatives have been instituted by Gov. Jim Doyle, but nothing on the scale that California has decided is in the interests of its citizens.

In fact, the Wisconsin plan omitted any coordinated commitment to adding transit and reducing highway projects, so one major category of greenhouse gas controls - - tailpipe emissions - - was exempted.

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Wait until customers begin paying their share of the Lake Michigan diversion and return flow cost, estimated at perhaps $60 million.

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