Foxconn Water Request Violates Law

Foxconn chairman Terry Gou and Governor Scott Walker signing a memorandum of understanding. Photo from the State of Wisconsin.

You have until March 21 to send the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources your thoughts – – email, regular mail directions, here – – on the application to the DNR for the green-light to divert 7 million gallons a day of Lake Michigan water to GOP Gov. Scott Walker‘s beloved, budget-busting project for Foxconn – – a private business headquartered in Taiwan.

This is the same project financed with record-breaking state subsidies organized by Walker and his compliant, GOP-led state legislature where excavation, paving and building on 3,000 acres of Racine County farmland, wetlands, lake beds and stream courses has been exempted through precedent-setting special-interest legislation from routine state environmental assessments and permit requirements.

So, yes, it’s important to send in your comments and build a strong record in favor of water conservation and Great Lakes integrity — despite plenty of reasons to believe that the approval is in the bag.

The diversion application – – to be reviewed by, and receive its up or down ruling from, the DNR and only the DNR – – also seeks DNR approval for Foxconn’s flat-screen panel production processes to consume about 40 percent of its daily diversion of water, with the balance returned to the lake properly treated.

Here’s an overriding thought about all this to consider:

*  The application has a fundamental credibility problem.

Why?

Because the DNR has a credibility problem, having been stripped of authenticity and respectability by a Governor who intentionally installed across top management positions a ‘chamber of commerce mentality.‘

He also cut its budget, laid off scientific staffers and generally trashed its mission to erase its legacy and weaken its relationship with the public and devalue its importance to individuals by creating in its place —  a hybrid agency — part Department of Agriculture, part Department of Commerce,

Which is why you won’t see the DNR fighting Republican state Sen. Tom Tiffany on his wetland-filing bill Walker just signed into law.

Or opposing Tiffany’s separate bill Walker also recently signed to allow companies to begin very toxic mining statewide that had been barred for the last 20 years.

So you can see why the DNR — this weakened, circumscribed and beaten-down iteration of a once-proud science and conservation-minded agency — is absolutely the wrong body at the wrong time to be asked to objectively assess whether diverting all that water to serve one private business meets the rules of a multi-state Compact created to allow such diversions for extremely-limited and public purposes only:

Jodi Habush Sinykin, an attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates, said the Great Lakes Compact bans diversions outside the Great Lakes basin unless they meet narrowly defined exceptions. She cited section 4.9.1 of the compact that states “all the water so transferred shall be used solely for public water supply purposes within the straddling community.”

The compact further defines “public water supply” as serving “largely residential customers that may also serve industrial, commercial and other institutional operators,” Sinykin said.

“Rather, the complete opposite is true,” she said. “Racine will use the majority, if not the entirety, of the diverted Great Lakes water to serve the industrial needs of a single, private, foreign industrial entity – Foxconn.”

The DNR should also be reviewing the company’s industrial-scale addition of chemicals to its manufacturing and wastewater treatment processes and the potential impact on the environment. But the DNR as it exists today is in no position to do this, as was explained by Gordon Stevenson, an engineer and former DNR Chief of Runoff Management who now serves Midwest Environmental Advocates as board secretary. At an MEA program in May, 2016, Stevenson said, in part:

For the majority of my career, water policy decisions were based on the strong bond between law and science, the people in charge of making those decisions had conservation and environmental protection credentials, and my colleagues and I shared the belief that Wisconsin’s true and sustaining wealth is its clean water.

Much of that is now changed at DNR. Wisconsin DNR’s water quality permit program has been found seriously deficient by the US Environmental Protection Agency. DNR is failing to protect downstream water from upstream pollution sources, they are allowing already impaired water bodies to get worse and they are suppressing the public’s ability to challenge water quality permit decisions.

Wisconsin DNR’s authority to protect Wisconsin’s water resources is delegated from EPA. Under the delegation agreement, DNR is obligated to administer the federal Clean Water Act. DNR is not doing so. On behalf of 16 Wisconsin citizens, Midwest Environmental Advocates has filed a Citizens Petition for Corrective Action with the US Environmental Protection agency to correct these deficiencies. The petition seeks to restore the credible water quality protection program that we once had in this state.

We’re arriving at an important crossroads in Wisconsin. We have our own version of Flint, Michigan in Kewaunee County where citizens cannot drink the water and we have our own version of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone. A dead zone now also exists in Green Bay that runs from the City of Green Bay all the way up to Marinette…

Water policy decisions should be based on the strong bond between law and science, that the people in charge of making water quality decisions should have the credentials to do so, and that Wisconsin’s true and sustaining wealth is its clean water.”