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MICHIGAN
WATER FOR SALEThe Perrier Company began in June building a $60 million water bottling plant in northcentral Michigan near the Little Muskegon River. Its plan to tap some 720,000 gallons per day of Michigan’s groundwater and sell it far and wide under the “Ice Mountain” label has triggered an avalanche of protests.
Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and others argue that, despite extensive and expensive testing, Perrier has yet to demonstrate the operation will not harm water quality and wetlands or diminish groundwater supplies. They also point out that the state has no meaningful groundwater protections. State laws are designed primarily to protect water quality, not water quantity.
Perrier plans to withdraw more water annually from its Mecosta County site than the amount of fresh water that a Canadian company proposed in 1998 to haul each year out of the Great Lakes in tankers. But Perrier’s proposed plant also is just one of nearly 10,500 large-scale groundwater wells in Michigan with little state oversight and no user fees. The Department of Environmental Quality was expected this summer to grant Perrier a permit to drill its high-capacity well.
“The ease with which the nation’s leading spring water bottler can set up shop in Michigan and draw for free on an increasingly valuable resource clearly exposes critical gaps in state water policy,” says Michigan Land Use Institute researcher Andrew Guy.
TIME’S UP DEQMichigan’s efforts to prevent pollution from both livestock factories and industrial smokestacks are so inadequate that the Bush administration has threatened to step in to protect public health and safety if state regulators do not improve oversight of water and air quality.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put the Department of Environmental Quality on notice with letters in January and April stating it is prepared to take over management, respectively, of Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act permitting in Michigan. The EPA gave the DEQ deadlines for making significant improvements.
Federal regulators are still waiting for the DEQ’s response in the case of air emissions. But the DEQ replied defiantly in the case of livestock factories, arguing that Michigan’s voluntary system of self-regulation is perfectly safe.
The EPA and citizen groups have, however, documented dozens of toxic manure spills in Michigan waterways from the industrial agriculture operations, which concentrate thousands of animals and millions of gallons of manure in small areas. The EPA has yet to respond to the DEQ’s defense of allowing livestock factories to police themselves until after the manure hits the water.
ROAD VICTORYThe Michigan Department of Transportation announced June 12 that it will “postpone” further study of its proposed Interstate 73 between Jackson and Toledo — the bureaucratic equivalent of giving up on a project. The decision comes only after thousands of citizens in southern Michigan spent two years organizing against the proposal for a new freeway through farms and prime recreational land. They urged the state to upgrade existing roads instead, which would improve safety, reduce congestion, protect open space, and save hundreds of millions of dollars. MDOT says it lacks the money to build the billion-dollar project and will now invest in those safety enhancements on local highways between Jackson and Toledo.
BUDGETARY SNAGGINGThe Michigan House of Representatives in June fast-tracked and passed a bill that would rob the state’s Fish and Game Trust Fund of its financial future. Representative Larry DeVuyst
(R-Alma) sponsored the legislation, which the Senate later approved. It caps the fund at $85 million and diverts all additional money — from the sale of minerals and timber on state lands — to covering operating expenses at the Department of Natural Resources. The Legislature specifically created the trust fund in 1987 to support outdoor recreation and to keep fees, such as fishing licenses, affordable. A portion of the fund is also dedicated to improving and acquiring new recreational facilities.
LOOK BOTH WAYSCitizens for Better Rail Alternatives, a coalition of civic groups, in June unveiled its plan for redeveloping a 1,300-acre industrial parcel that now separates several neighborhoods in the Corktown area of Detroit. The coalition hopes to use $250 million in federal funds to reclaim the industrial site with modern passenger and freight rail facilities, as well as retail and affordable housing developments. The Michigan Department of Transportation, however, has a different idea of how to use the land and the federal funds. MDOT is considering a plan to use the parcel solely for industrial shipping, which would necessitate nine new truck routes through surrounding residential areas.
WORKING FOR THE FARMWest Michigan’s Ottawa County Planning Commission is considering a program to transfer development rights from rural to urban properties, a tool used to guide growth toward existing towns and keep farming areas relatively free of pavement and traffic.
Local governments have been waiting years for state legislators to enact a statewide TDR program. The House Committee on Land Use and Environment, which Representative Ruth Johnson
(R-Holly) chairs, now is considering such a measure, called the Development Rights Marketing Act (House Bill 4346).
But rather than wait any longer on Lansing’s political process, farmer and Ottawa County Planning Commissioner Bill Miller decided to take the first step. If the county adopts the new agricultural preservation tool, builders could buy development rights from farmland in rural parts of the county and transfer the rights to designated growth areas elsewhere in the county. Alpine Township in neighboring Kent County also is gearing up for possible development rights transfers with a citizen action committee that it has charged with studying the idea.
CHEERS AND JEERS >>
