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By JAMES KROHE JR. Water policy in Illinois: the search for balance Simplicity was the hallmark of Illinois' earliest water policy. But as the state's population has grown and the opportunities for exploitation have increased, water policy has become enormously complicated. Today there are 14 state agencies dealing with various aspects of water in Illinois: floods, drinking water, soil erosion, mine pollution, navigation, recreation, research and pollution. Like too many cooks in the kitchen, these agencies have sometimes duplicated each other's functions or operated at cross purposes. In an attempt to rectify these shortcomings, a State Water Plan Task Force, comprised of representatives of the 14 state water agencies was established in 1980. Its goal was to delineate the problems facing Illinois' water resources and to formulate a "total water management system" that would eliminate or mitigate these problems. How successful has the task force been since its inception? Can the citizens of Illinois rely on the future quantity and quality of their water supplies? These questions and related issues are explored in this, the final article in our series on water resources in Illinois, funded by The Joyce Foundation WATER policy in Illinois used to be a simple matter of first come, first served. The use, and abuse, of water was a purely local concern. As populations grew with the capacity to exploit the resource, the effects of the local water decisions spread downstream. Municipal governments became involved first, usually at the point at which unrestricted dumping of sewage into the local creek made it undrinkable. Gradually the state involved itself, first as a mediator of conflicting public and private interests. Later the state became an interested party in its own right as it sought to provide services which were beyond the jurisdiction or the means of its local governments. The state remained the preeminent decisionmaker on water policy into the 1970s. In a century and a half a sizable and varied water bureaucracy has sprouted in Illinois. The official count of Illinois water agencies is 14. The major ones include:
12 | November 1982 | Illinois Issues
State task force on water As one might expect, coherence has not been a conspicuous virtue of Illinois water policy in the past. Like all agencies, each of the state's water bureaucracies has its own interest group clientele, its own institutional priorities, its own style. However, the sheer number of agencies whose work touchies on water aggravates these routine complications. Events of the 1970s made it clear that water policy would have to be rescued from its own specialists. More and more of the issues confronting the state appeared on official agendas under the heading, "Cross cutting topics." The rise in the cost of classic structural solutions to water problems — flood control dams, centralized water supply systems, big sewage treatment plants — made alternative management solutions more imperative. Illinois had drafted a state water plan to guide policymaking in 1967, but the plan was hopelessly out of date within a decade. In 1980, therefore, Gov. James R. Thompson established a State Water Plan Task Force comprised of representatives of the 14 state water agencies, to work under the direction of IDOT's DWR. The goal was to develop what the task force came to call a "total water management system" for "resource utilization." The task force would focus on what it called "problems at the margin of attention." Preliminary discussions (including public hearings) yielded 10 such problems: erosion; integration of water quality and quantity management; conservation; flood damages; water competition; water habitat; recreation; atmospheric modification; drought planning; and water law. A final plan remains a long way from completion. But task force members agree that merely meeting monthly has been helpful. Glenn Stout, director of the WRC, is one of these. "Water policy in Illinois is fragmented," he explains. "However, since this planning effort began, there has been an improvement in coordination. Water users used to have to get three separate permits from the Corps of Engineers, IDOT and IEPA before they could build anything. Now there is a single permit application process. DOC, ISWS and IEPA all used to do their own monitoring work. Now that research is coordinated to provide a congruent base of data." Such improvements are welcome. But the broader goals of the task force will be much harder to realize. The task force's mission argues for a water management system that is "socially acceptable." But inoffensive policies are usually ineffective policies; no one fears being bitten by a creature which has no teeth. Further, the task force assigned the job of drafting various parts of the plan to its member agencies. This strategy saves time and duplication, but it also risks perpetuating existing policies. Role of local governments Although in many ways the state is the ideal policymaker for water issues, local governments in Illinois still play a vital, if reduced, role. Water supply is still largely a local responsibility, in spite of the trend toward regional systems. And flood control is ultimately a land use question, whose answer (in the opinion of people who have tried other ways) is in the hands of local planning and zoning boards. Take floods. Flood damages have been rising steadily in Illinois in recent years, largely because of increased building on floodplains. Yet the response to flood damages by property owners and local officials alike is to demand more federal and state flood control projects. Such complaints were most recently heard in Chicago's northern suburbs, where a flood control plan proposed in 1974 but still under study by the Corps of Engineers would have prevented millions of dollars in damages in the summer of 1981. Controls on building in the flood-plain might have accomplished much the same ends at less cost, and indeed it is IDOT's aim to make sure that people don't (quoting one official there) "build themselves into a problem we have to build them out of." But the state is not eager to expand its regulatory authority over local governments, and local officials have little incentive to do anything as long as state and federal agencies "build them out" of their flood problems.
The State Water Plan Task Force recommends that state and local governments "strengthen" floodplain regulations, but doesn't say how. Not only do people continue to build on floodplains, they typically refuse to leave such homes even after being flooded out. Warnings of possible economic loss seem to have little effect either; state officials were shocked to find that only 118 of 1,000 flooded homeowners in Deerfield in 1981 carried flood insurance. A similar shortsightedness hampers water supply planning. Water supplies are like oil wells: the easiest supplies are tapped first. As old reservoirs silt up, wells dry up, water mains corrode, the costs of providing water rise. The cost of replacing 24-inch pipe can run as high as $200,000 a mile. Energy (mainly for pumping) now makes up an average of 16 percent of the operating budgets of Illinois water systems. And since debt service already accounts for half the budget of the typical Illinois water system, high interest rates add special burdens. The financial weight of new water supply systems is forcing many Illinois municipalities to act together to support what each of them could not support separately. Inevitably such cooperative ventures pose their own kinds of problems. A National Well Water November 1982 | Illinois Issues | 13 Association official recently proposed that water-starved Chicago suburbs build deep wells to pump Lake Michigan water below ground to replenish depleted aquifers rather than build new surface distribution systems. IDOT officials pointed out to reporters that such a scheme would require "almost impossible" cooperation among the 50 municipalities involved. Concluded the official, "We all know how people feel about the RTA. How would they feel about the RWA?" Intergovernmental dustups over water promise to become more frequent. A referendum in which DuPage County voters were to decide whether to issue $85 million in bonds as part of a new Lake Michigan water distribution system was recently canceled by the county board. The cause was feuding over control of the system between the board and the DuPage Water Commission, which is made up of the municipalities involved. Chicago's new western suburbs are resembling the Old West more and more. Most of the political struggles over water supply systems are attempts to avoid the blame for rising rates. (The new system in DuPage County, for instance, is expected to cost $284 million to build. Paying for it will help push water rates from their present 90 cent per 1,000 gallons to as much as $4 per 1,000, according to one estimate.) Experts in Illinois agree that water is generally priced much too low. Often rates are too low even to cover routine maintenance costs. Thus the real cost of providing dependable water is disguised by deferring needed capital investments. In effect, elected officials transfer the costs of running their water systems from people voting today to people who won't vote until some distant tomorrow. Federal involvement When it comes to water projects, Congress can be as parochial as any city hall. The federal government has been a presence in Illinois water policy-making since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began clearing shipping channels on the Mississippi River in the 1820s. Washington remained preoccupied with navigation and flood control through the 1960s. The principal change in such projects over those 140 years was their scale; the agency which began by pulling logs out of rivers eventually became able to reroute them and remodel their valleys. It was not until the 1970s that Congress took an interest in water quality issues as keen as its historical interest in water quantity issues. A new environmental consciousness embodied itself in the chapters of a half-dozen new water laws passed in that busy decade. Congress first passed
There had always been a certain philosophical necessity in the federal role in water policy. Water by its nature is a form of interstate commerce. Like many arranged marriages, the union of state and federal bureaucracies — each with the same general aims but differing in legal responsibilities, resources, history and clientele — has been more a matter of convenience than love. The federal half came with a generous dowry, however. Traditional water projects tend by their nature to be expensive, and only Washington had the money to undertake so many of them. A flood of loans and grants gushed from Washington to the states in the 1970s, and not just for dams and levees and sewage treatment plants. Federal money largely built an extensive new bureaucracy to manage it, with grants for planning, enforcement and research. The states, including Illinois, often complained about the inflexibility, the irrelevance, the arrogance of their federal benefactors' rule. Nonetheless, most regarded it as a bargain well made. Illinois, for example, was able to have its water projects and balance its budget too. Operating expenditures at IEPA (of which about a third is spent on water) rose by 300 percent between 1971 and 1979. In 1971, federal funds accounted for only 7 percent of the total; by 1979 the feds' share had gone up to 47 percent. Increases in state funding for the Illinois Water Survey during the 1970s were modest, with the result that today more than 60 percent of its research work is paid for by outside money. (Notes one survey staffer, with scant exaggeration, "The Survey is really funded by the USEPA.") The same situation obtains at the University of Illinois' Institute of Environmental Studies in Urbana, where roughly 75 percent of its budget comes from contracts with Federal agencies. What the IEPA admits in its current water pollution control plan — "The realization of this work plan is heavily dependent on federal resources" — could also be said by most of the state's water agencies. Such dependency has its risks, however. When Ronald Reagan pledged to restore to the states responsibility for running federal programs, the states applauded. They have been less enthusiastic about accepting the responsibility for paying for them. The Reagan administration's budget cuts were an inevitable result of his "new federalism." "New federalism" has been variously defined, usually according to the temper of the nation's governors and mayors. Some programs would be cut altogether; others maintained but with funding responsibilities shifted to the states. According to one recent version, for example, responsibility for a total of $2.9 billion in money for water and sewer grants and loans would be shifted from Washington. Whether such budget reforms flow from the doctrine or the doctrine is merely a pretext for budget cuts is arguable, even if the effects on Illinois' 14 | November 1982 | Illinois Issues water establishment is not. Either way the budget cuts signal a revolution not just in the ways certain public services are funded, but the way they are thought about. The Reagan administration has insisted that the costs of things like waterways and sewage plants be more fully borne by those who benefit most directly from them. It has asserted the primacy of the national economic interest over regional interest, and of energy and economic development over the environment as criteria in evaluating water projects. And it has hinted that certain services long regarded as the imperative of public bodies might be better and more economically provided by private entities. Effects of budget cuts One need not be a full-blooded Reaganite to agree that very often government has indeed been the problem in water policymaking. For example, federal grants and subsidies to local governments for things like water supply projects distort demand by making water cheaper than it ought to be. Accordingly, funds for such projects from such agencies as the FmHA are now subject to tighter controls. In Pike County, a $3 million expansion of a rural water system has been postponed because of the lack of grant money, and low-cost FmHA loans of the sort which brought piped water to many an Illinois subdivision are now available only for projects which serve poor areas or are needed to correct a public health problem. Congress has not agreed to all of Reagan's cuts. The Illinois Water Resources Center, for one example, wasn't funded at all under Reagan's proposed 1982 budget, but Congress restored funding for it and the other state centers (established in 1964 under part of the federal Water Resources Research Act). Says WRC director Stout, "Congress still realizes there is a pending water crisis, and that we need money to prepare for it. But the White House seems to think that water is a local problem." The same lament can be heard, in varying tones, from agency after agency. USEPA's proposed 1983 budget for water quality programs is down 40 percent from 1981 spending. Federal spending for new sewage treatment plants in Illinois had already slipped to $98 million in 1981 after a high of $363 million in 1975, and Reagan's proposed cuts are expected to result in the suspension of 50 projects in the state. The need to set priorities among projects is obvious; there are literally hundreds of projects in Illinois being planned, designed or built. The local effects of federal cuts can be seen in Decatur. That city is facing IEPA sanctions because of inadequate sewer capacity. An expansion has been proposed, one phase of which alone would cost $57 million. But Congress in its compromise budget bill of 1981 agreed to reduce the federal share of such projects begun after 1984 from its present 75 percent to 55 percent. The difference, as one Decatur sanitary official told reporters, is a "whopping amount of money." The state has had its share of money troubles in recent years too, of course. Illinois' commitment to clean water, both fiscal and administrative, somewhat antedates that of Washington. As early as 1970 Illinois set about funding its own sewage treatment plants, for instance, through the $750 million in bond funds authorized under the Anti-Pollution Bond Act. To date that act has helped build more than 200 treatment projects. But most of that $750 milion has already been obligated, and in any event (quoting IEPA) "the fiscal position of the State required curtailment of bond obligations [for the 1983 budget]." General revenues are just as scarce. For example, in the fall of 1979 the Illinois Department of Agriculture was made responsible for implementing Illinois' USEPA-approved soil erosion control program. But a cost-sharing program designed to get farmers to try reduced tillage methods was cut. Soil conservation professionals insist that more money is also needed to treble local conservation staffs. Lacking support for flat grants, the Illinois Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts lobbied for adoption of a "risk share" program which would guarantee farmers against any losses from trying reduced tillage methods. The General Assembly refused even this modest program, pleading lack of funds. So parsimonious have federal and state lawmakers become that the IASWCD has established a $150,000 private endowment intended to fund conservation staff. Changing strategies Finding a balance among what is necessary, what is desirable and what is affordable is the soul of good policy. It seems fair to say that the search for that balance has led Congress down a few dead ends. Consider pollution. It is probably not accurate to insist that Congress in the 1970s committed the U.S. to spend more than it could afford to clean up its water. It just seems that way because governments in 1982 can afford to spend so much less than they could in 1972. Inevitably, the disputes over pollution control strategies are being increasingly argued in economic terms, specifically their costs and benefits. There is a point at which it costs more to clean a stream than it is worth, whether that worth is measured in infants who don't die prematurely or fish that otherwise couldn't spawn. Nitrates are a case in point. The IPCB has set a limit on the amounts of nitrates allowable in Illinois drinking water. Nitrates enter Illinois water from farm fertilizers or feedlots, as well as natural sources. Acted upon by the human digestive system, they can be transformed into nitrites (the cause of hemoglobin anemia or "blue baby" syndrome) or nitrosamines (a suspected carcinogen). Many downstate community water systems routinely exceed this limit, especially in the spring. Nitrates can be removed, but only at great expense. Rather than require removal, IEPA relies on public warnings when nitrate levels get too high. Officials point out that the risk to infants — a small population in more ways than one — is easily reduced by the temporary use of bottled water. Among adults, the incidence of stomach cancers associated with nitrosamines has been declining. Warnings November 1982 | Illinois Issues | 15 and common sense are only slightly less effective protectors of the public health than elaborate removal requirements and vastly cheaper. Many clean water standards are precautionary, based on still-unsubstantiated assumptions of risk. The result is that local water officials must often weigh hypothetical, long-term risks to public health against the short-term risks to the public pocketbook. In 1978, when the USEPA was holding hearings on a proposed new standard limiting trihalomethanes in drinking water, Springfield's water commissioner testified that such a standard would increase his system's revenue needs by 25 percent and (assuming EPA's own estimates of the links between THM and cancer were accurate) would prevent one cancer tumor every three years at a cost of roughly $900,000 per tumor. Even by the standards of the day, that is preventive medicine of the most egregiously expensive sort. Costs have always been a factor in pollution planning in Illinois. One of the criteria set forth for wastewater treatment in the seminal 1970 Illinois Environmental Protection Act was "economic reasonableness." The federal largesse of the 1970s, however, kept state and local officials alike busy thinking up ways to spend money, not save it. With the scaling back of public budgets has come a proportionate scaling back of official ambitions for the environment. The current IEPA water pollution control plan carefully describes its mission as realizing the best water conditions possible "consistent with the social and economic needs of the people" — a far cry from the "zero discharge" promises of the 1970s. The future of water policy Economics is behind the most significant revision of clean water rules since the state and federal acts were passed a decade ago — IEPA's gradual conversion from general pollution standards which now apply to most of the state's waters to site-specific standards based on use. Extensive public hearings were begun in the late 1970s which sought to establish the most feasible uses for 123 stream "segments" around Illinois. Streams running through unpopulated rural areas, for example, might be made to support more fish, but such cleanup efforts would be irrelevant if no one near them wanted to fish. In urban areas, in contrast, streams now befouled might be made subject to stiffer cleanup standards in order to upgrade them into badly needed recreational resources. The IEPA insists that redefining its regulations from "a localized point of view" will "offer the opportunity to optimize water pollution control resource expenditures." Example: After three years of complaints, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission agreed that Lake County would have to spend $1.4 billion on a new sewer interceptor to meet biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) limits because there simply is not presently a BOD problem in Lake Michigan.
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In retrospect it is apparent, then, that congress spent millions of dollars in the 1970s solving problems which didn't exist, and in the process often created new ones. It is for these reasons that the retrenchment in spending on large, centralized, automated pollution control facilities does not strike some experts as wholly bad news. John Pfeffer, an environmental engineer at the U of I's Department of Civil Engineering at Urbana, believes that the easy availability of federal grants "made it too easy for municipalities to meet the regulations" for wastewater treatment; as a result, he says, "no one questioned whether those regulations were wise." Pfeffer cites the example of a $20 million tertiary treatment plant built in Champaign-Urbana which led to water quality improvements worth no more than $10,000 to local fishermen. "You get a lot more improvement in water quality for the money," Pfeffer believes, "if you spend it instead on erosion control or controlling urban storm water runoff." It may be that in the 1980s the questions which heretofore have been asked mainly by environmentalists — namely, how to dispose of sewage in less capital-intensive, energy-intensive, land-intensive ways — will be asked by sanitary engineers and budget officers. Such technologies exist, in the form of lagoons, land treatment systems, improved septic tanks, even waterless composting home toilets. What has been lacking is a commitment to their use. Ultimately (according to theory at any rate) it will be the public who will decide who will do what with water, where and why. Michael Witte, director of DENR, spoke to that point at his department's 1982 annual conference entitled, "Competition for Water: Can Illinois Stay Afloat?" Witte noted, "Many of the solutions reside in the political process," although he cautioned, "This is not to say that those solutions necessarily reside in government agencies." Indeed, one can infer from the 1980 national election results a certain expression of political will by voters on resource issues such as water. The question is, how informed are the choices which cumulatively comprise resource politics? Witte notes of water that the "public perception of the crisis is low." The limits of public resources have been recognized, even if their effects are not yet widely appreciated. But of the even more pressing limits of technology, and of nature, little is known outside a coterie of experts. Betty Reed, the Lake County legislator who is chairman of the Illinois Water Resources Commission, made much the same point to the same audience. The General Assembly has not reformed Illinois' water policy, she explained, because most of its members "do not know there is a problem yet." Legislators, like their constituents, remain resolutely crisis-oriented. Agency coordination, more rational funding, better data can all enhance the making and carrying out of water policy. But major policy innovations themselves, one suspects, await some catastrophe. Droughts and smelly wells and epidemics, like hangings, concentrate peoples' minds wonderfully. As Illinois Times environmental reporter Harold Henderson has written about Wilsonville, "The political heat from the struggle . . . has helped prod the usually torpid Illinois legislature into [passing] some of the toughest waste control bills in the U.S. — bills which could not even get out of committee before Wilsonville erupted." Every state, it seems, needs its Love Canal. James Krohe Jr. is a contributing editor to Illinois Issues and associate editor of the Illinois Times in Springfield; he specializes in planning, land use and energy issues. November 1982 | Illinois Issues | 17 |
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