By O.T. BANTON
A newspaperman for more than 50 years, he covered the legislature and state government for the Lindsay-Schaub papers for 18 years prior to his semiretirement in 1962.

Decatur still needs water, and many think there was a good case for Oakley dam

THE LONG BATTLE over the Oakley dam and reservoir is over, but some postmortem reflections of the losers could still be of public interest.

The city of Decatur strongly supported the project in order to insure a future water supply and agreed to pay a proportionate share of the cost. Because the project was scrapped, Decatur is now left with the problem of finding some other source of water for its heavy industrial needs. While some alternatives are available, none promises to meet the expected needs and it is likely the city will have to resort to a costly combination of alternatives. It must act, for its lake is filling with silt at the rate of one per cent of its capacity a year.

The proposed dam would have been built on the Sangamon River just north of Decatur, and at the 636-foot level advocated by the U.S. Corps of Engineers/would have backed water into the bottomlands of Allerton Park near Monticello. As first proposed and as later scaled back, the normal pool level would have been 621 to 623 feet above sea level, and the reservoir itself would have been approximately three miles from the nearest edge of the park.

While the bitterest stage of the controversy was waged over prospects for the 636- foot level, opponents continued to fight even after it was agreed to go back to the lower level. By that time the project had been in various stages of planning for 30 years, and in that period the cost of building reservoirs had increased greatly. The result was that the cost-benefit ratio by which the federal government judges feasibility of public construction projects went through the bottom, and the lake was dead. This was announced after the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) in 1974 was asked by Illinois Sen. Charles H. Percy to make a new study of the project, and GAO found the cost-benefit ratio to be one to less than one.

While Percy had given only qualified support to the project, it had been backed vigorously by Sens. Everett M. Dirksen and Paul Douglas and with somewhat less ardor by Sen. Adlai Stevenson III. It also had had strong support from Govs. Otto Kerner and Richard Ogilvie, and U.S. Reps. William Springer and Edward Madigan(R., Illinois).

A big share of the victory for killing the project is being claimed by a Champaign-Urbana group made up mainly of faculty members of the University of Illinois. The group called itself the Committee on Allerton Park (COAP). First spokesman for this group was Dr. Lawrence C. Bliss, professor of botany, who in 1968 told this writer that he was opposed to the building of any dams for any purpose. Lake Decatur dam, he said, should never have been built. The Lake Decatur dam was started in 1921, and produced a lake on the Sangamon River that passed through the east side of the city and was 13 miles long. The impoundment it created not only enabled the A.E. Staley grain processing company to stay in Decatur and expand, but provided water that enabled Decatur to grow from a small city of 30,000 to its present 90,000. Other spokesmen for the COAP have been Dr. Jack Paxton, a young assistant professor in plant pathology, and Bruce Hannon, an instructor in engineering.

Decatur people and others who saw advantages from recreational facilities and other benefits such a lake would provide, were badly jarred by what they felt to be unfair tactics used in fighting the project. Some of the spokesmen contended the lake was being built mainly for Decatur's benefit and to "flush Decatur's sewage down the Sangamon River." This was based on a feature in the Corps of Engineers design plans called "low flow augmentation" of the river below the Decatur dam. Historically, the river flow has been very low in July and August, and in some years it dried up into a few stagnant pools; this period was lengthened somewhat after the Decatur dam was built, and water in the river below the dam in dry weather consisted of little more than the effluent from Decatur's sewage treatment plant.

As the Decatur sewage argument was bandied about, some foes of the dam got to talking about it as "raw sewage," and writers of letters to the editor of the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers some distance from central Illinois also made reference to the city wanting the dam to "flush raw sewage down the Sangamon River." As an alumnus of the University of Illinois, 1 was greatly perturbed to note that faculty members, who were leading the fight on the dam and knew better, did not lift a finger to disillusion the public on these serious misstatements.

The facts are that Decatur's sewage treatment plant is among the most efficient in the state, producing an effluent of 90 to 91 per cent water purity, the same percentages as the plants in Springfield and Champaign-Urbana, whose effluents are also discharged into nearby rivers. It was Decatur officials and civic leaders who drafted the bill passed by the 1917 legislature that authorized formation of sanitary districts. A few months later, Decatur was the first city in the state to proceed to formation of such a district, followed soon after by Champaign-Urbana and a little later by Springfield and Peoria. Decatur is now nearing completion of an $11 million construction program for upgrading its sewage plant, one of the largest such programs in the state.

The low flow augmentation would have been provided by holding back some of the heavy flow of water in the Sangamon in spring to flow downriver during the dry season and to keep the river a live stream all year. From the Decatur dam to -where the Sangamon flows into the Illinois River near Beardstown is 135 miles, and proponents of Oakley reservoir pointed to many advantages of the river parkway or "green belt" they envisioned along that part of the river. The Corps of Engineers promised there would be no straightening or channelization of the river, which would be allowed to meander in its present course. There would have been some deepening to five feet, and fallen logs that created jams would be removed.

Such improvement would have permitted better canoeing than is now possible and would have enabled more extensive use of the old riverboat Talisman at New Salem State Park, whose operation is now limited to two or three miles in times of low water. A

22 / May 1977 / Illinois Issues


With present solutions to its water problem only temporary, Decatur might have to compete with other cities for water from the Teays aquifer

fresh water flow in the stream also would improve fishing greatly, it was pointed out. Few game fish have survived the periods of stagnant pools to which the river is reduced each year in July and August. The Corps of Engineers also talked of $1 million a year in benefits from flood control to farmers downstream. This was a disputed figure, and sentiment among the farmers was divided on the subject. Some recognized they would benefit, but others objected to having the rich bottomland acreage cut off their holdings to produce the proposed green belt. The Oakley project would have shortened the flooding period, since flood waters would have been carried away faster with a deepened stream and with the log blockades removed. It would have given wildlife a better chance to survive in flood periods; one farmer told of seeing squirrels marooned in trees in flood time, obviously without sufficient food available.

Supporters of the COAP had from the beginning a slogan of "Save Allerton Park," and talked constantly of the proposed impoundment "destroying" the park. In getting petitions to present to Illinois governors and to Congress, they asked people in many parts of the state if they would lend their names to a drive to save the park. That made it easy to get signatures in large numbers.

The facts are that even at the highest level proposed for the lake, Oakley would not have destroyed Allerton Park. At the 636-foot level it would have flooded about 600 acres of bottomlands in the 1,500-acre park — the rest was on high ground that would not have been touched. Some natural science classes at the University of Illinois had been using the bottomlands for research projects over a considerable period of years, but many questioned the high value that foes of the dam placed on this research. The bottomlands traditionally have been flooded heavily a few to several times a year, sometimes for considerable periods.

Robert Allerton, millionaire landowner who donated the park to the university, apparently saw little value in the bottomlands in their natural state. The story of his views on the subject was told to me by the late William Lodge of Monticello, whose father, a building contractor, built about all the improvements on the Allerton farms except the old brick mansion. Lodge said: "I worked with father on the Allerton building projects — including the formal gardens — for about 15 summers and on weekends. One day, after we had finished the wide brick stairs that lead from the gardens down to near the bottomlands level, father, Mr. Allerton and I were standing at the top of the steps and Mr. Allerton said, with a sweep of his arm out toward the bottomlands, 'wouldn't it be wonderful if those bottomlands were a lake!'"

That obviously would have been a potent argument to have thrown in the faces of Oakley's opponents, but Mr. Lodge requested that such use not be made of it. He explained that "the present Mr. Allerton," Robert Allerton's foster son, had been talked by the opposition into opposing the lake, and he and Lodge were Monticello neighbors. Lodge's confidence was kept, but it certainly seems legitimate to make it public now.

Future social and economic developments doubtless will show whether dams should be built in streams or whether they should be left in their natural state. Foes of Oakley have been condemning the building of Lakes Shelbyville and Carlyle on the Kaskaskia River as mistakes and describing both as a "mess." Many champions of Oakley would agree with them in part — that dams should be built only where a good case can be made for their need and prospective benefits, as compared to damage. But they felt a good case had been made for Oakley. Many also feel that if population growth cannot be curbed, there will be a need for more jobs and more manufacture of goods to meet the growing needs. Hence, industry must expand — and its attendant need for adequate water supplies.

Decatur is now trying to decide between two alternative sources of augmented water supply: a small reservoir on Long Creek upstream from present Lake Decatur, or a lower level dam in the Sangamon River. The city's engineering consultant is John C. Guillou, former chief of the Illinois Division of Waterways and now member of a Springfield consulting firm. Either solution is recognized as temporary, and after a period some other source will have to be added.

The best quality of water would be from wells sunk into the aquifer of the Teays River, also known to some as the Mahomet River. Such wells now supply Champaign-Urbana, Monticello, Paxton, Rantoul, Clinton and several villages. The Teays before the ice age was a wide river that flowed across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia. Glaciers from the north filled its valley, and water now can be obtained by wells from these areas. Hydrologists do not know the capacity of this aquifer, but some question what might happen if Decatur came to depend heavily on this source for large industrial users. On the subject, William Ackerman, head of the Illinois Water Survey at the University of Illinois had this to say: "While the supply of water in the Teays sand, gravel and rock deposits always has been felt to be more than adequate for the draw-off it now is getting, it was not felt wise to have too many wells in the same area." Ackerman was referring to the sinking of wells to serve the U.S. Industrial Chemical Co. plant near Tuscola; wells to serve that industry were located south of Route 10 since those serving Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois were on the north side of the highway.

Recognition of the fact the Teays River deposits probably are not inexhaustible was the basis for comments by former Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall. In a letter to Dr. William D. Klimstra, chairman of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. Udall said: "While Decatur has available a desirable reservoir at the Oakley site, Champaign-Urbana has much less favorable opportunity for such development [they are on a high area with no river flowing toward them]. Those cities already have tapped the Teays valley aquifer. Expanded use of such waters by Decatur would hasten the time when Champaign-Urbana would need to seek alternative water supply sources and would increase the cost of production [of water supplies] for all using the Teays aquifer."

This was regarded by some who read it as a friendly warning that, if heavy draw-offs from the aquifer showed its water source to be limited, the Champaign-Urbana wells, being on appreciably higher ground than those of other cities and villages using Teays water, would be the first to go dry. 


How wet is the drought?

MARCH rains brought relief from the 11-month drought that caused Gov. James R. Thompson on March 15 to request federal disaster aid for 37 western and central Illinois counties. But normal or above normal rainfall is needed through June to replenish water tables and wells, still at alarmingly low levels, and to keep the soil from drying out again in late summer. Holding ponds and small municipal reservoirs are also vulnerable because silting has decreased their storage capacity.

Drought aid to farmers is tunneled through the federal Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) with offices in each county. By April many counties had exhausted their funds, and the state ASCS, which had already provided six counties with $175,000 in emergency funds, was expecting more requests.

Municipalities with water shortages can contact the state Emergency. Services and Disaster Agency, Springfield (phone: 217/782-7860). The agency, which does not deal with individuals, can be reached 24 hours a day and expedites requests for aid because of natural or man made disasters.

May 1977 / Illinois Issues / 23


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