Kris Kristofferson wrote: “Everybody’s gotta havesomebody to look down on … Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frownon. If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me.”
That song could be played pretty much continuouslythese days around the offices of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District(MMSD).
Right-wing radio talk shows are not usually knownfor their righteous indignation over environmental issues except to belittlepeople who want to preserve the Earth. But they have long made an exception toattack MMSD every time Milwaukee sewers overflowand release untreated wastewater into Lake Michigan.
You can imagine how apoplectic all thoseconservative talkers were after the recent flash flood that destroyed 19Milwaukee homes, backed up sewage and water into thousands of area basementsand released 2.1 billion gallons of untreated sewer water into the lake.
Like most anti-government outrage these days, allthe spluttering didn’t include a single proposal for how our political leadersshould be spending the taxpayers’ money to solve the problem.
When you don’t believe in government, forcingeverybody to pay for sewage treatment is just socialism.
What we heard, instead, were relentless attacks onMMSD’s 17-year-old Deep Tunnel project that holds more than 520 million gallonsof sewage underground during intense flooding to be treated later whenfacilities are able to handle it.
It’s a curious target. No one seriously concernedabout sewage being released into Lake Michiganwould want the Deep Tunnel not to be doing its job and another half-billiongallons of sewage going directly into the lake.
But no one who saw the YouTube videos of college-agesurfers challenging “Shorewood Rapids” up to their necks could possibly thinkany sewerage district anywhere could tax its citizens enough to handleproblem-free the biblical flooding of the recent storm.
The truth is before the construction of the DeepTunnel, Milwaukee-area sanitary and storm sewers overflowed 50 to 60 times ayear into rivers and the lake.
Since the Deep Tunnel began operation, the combinedsewers have overflowed an average of 2.6 times a year.
Fecal contamination of our water is dramaticallyreduced.
In 1975, overflows contributed 49% of the annualvolume of fecal coliform bacteria (just as bad as it sounds) in Milwaukee’s rivers andharbor. By 2000, those overflows you hear so much about were contributing only7% of such bacteria to the waterways.
Forcing the Issue
So Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier and those CommonCouncils of yore must have been real visionaries to build that Deep Tunnel,huh? Right. And clapping your hands together will save little Tinkerbell’slife.
Politics back in the 1970s worked pretty much thesame as it does now. There was only one reason why Milwaukee embarked upon construction of theDeep Tunnel, the most expensive public works project in its history.
The state of Illinoissued Milwaukee in federal court in the ’70s tostop MMSD’s repeated sewage overflows into Lake Michigan.If you were located south of Milwaukeeon the lake, you would have done the same thing.
Despite everything you hear about those awfullawyers who file lawsuits over every little befouling of the world’s largestfreshwater supply, sometimes the only way you can get politicians to do theright thing is under court order.
Damn that activist federal judge who forced Milwaukee to spend $4 billion in taxes to build a DeepTunnel that reduced fecal contamination of Lake Michiganby 85%!
A Canadian environmental group a few years agoranked Milwaukee first among all major cities onthe Great Lakes in efforts to reduce seweroverflows.
With all the outrage talk radio attempted to whip upover basement backups and sewage in our water source, not a single localpolitician has stepped up to volunteer to set a new record for the mostexpensive public works project in Milwaukee history.
That includes gubernatorial candidates MilwaukeeMayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker.
MMSD estimates it would cost $6 billion or more toincrease the storage capacity of the Deep Tunnel by 1.7 billion gallons. Thatwould get sewer overflows closer to zero, but not really improve water qualityby much.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be spending more toprevent sewer backups, especially in older areas of the city where entireneighborhoods are devastated repeatedly.
But just hating government doesn’t feed the bulldog.At a time when politicians are trying to outdo each other on cutting taxes, weneed an outraged public demanding more spending to upgrade the deterioratinginfrastructure of an aging sewer system.
If we let politicians off the hook on that one, theonly folks we should be mad at are ourselves.
