Waukesha — City officials began rolling out their long-anticipated bid for Great Lakes water on Monday with a glimpse at its possible costs.
Switching the city's water supply to Lake Michigan rather than groundwater wells would cost $56 million in initial construction costs and another $5.3 million a year in operating costs, Water Utility General Manager Dan Duchniak said Monday.
Building a pipeline to discharge treated wastewater to Underwood Creek in Wauwatosa so it would flow back to Lake Michigan, as required by a Great Lakes protection compact, would cost another $22 million plus $499,000 a year in operating costs, Duchniak said. He was scheduled to release the latest cost estimates Monday evening at a joint meeting of the Waukesha Common Council and Water Utility Commission at City Hall.
Total price: $78 million to get started and nearly $5.8 million a year to operate the system, according to estimates revised since the city's original 2002 water supply study, Duchniak said.
Waukesha might ask to use a maximum of 18.5 million gallons a day 50 years from now, down from past estimates of between 20 million and 24 million gallons a day, he said. The drop in peak use comes from successful conservation efforts, he said.
The city likely will need an average of 10 million to 11 million gallons a day of lake water to serve its customers in 50 years, Duchniak said. In 2008, the city pumped an average of 6.9 million gallons a day from wells.
Monday's meeting was the first in a series of public discussions over the next several months on the city's proposed use of Great Lakes water, Mayor Larry Nelson said.
Nelson said he will ask the Common Council on Oct. 20 for authorization to request letters of intent or willingness to sell Waukesha lake water from three possible suppliers - Milwaukee, Racine and Oak Creek.
A draft application might be distributed publicly at a Dec. 8 Common Council meeting, and that is the tentative date for a public hearing on the plan, Nelson said.
Nelson said he expects to ask the Common Council to approve an application to the state Department of Natural Resources by February. After DNR review, the city's bid would need the approval of each of the governors of the seven other Great Lakes states, under terms of the Great Lakes compact.
If they receive all those approvals, Waukesha officials prefer to buy lake water from Milwaukee rather than Racine or Oak Creek, Nelson said. Milwaukee's water already is distributed to nearby suburbs, so the cost of a connection would be less.
The preferred return pipe would end at Underwood Creek rather than going all the way to Lake Michigan, Duchniak said. Building a pipeline to the lake would cost $58 million - $36 million more than the creek outlet. Pumping and other operating costs also would be higher, up to $1.5 million a year for the longer route to the lake.
Underwood Creek is a tributary of the Menomonee River, which empties into the Milwaukee River upstream of Milwaukee's harbor.
One option to Great Lakes water is building a network of new wells in deep sandstone west of Waukesha to replace the city's existing deep sandstone wells, which are contaminated with radium and salt.
Cost of establishing the distant well field is estimated at $116 million, Duchniak said. Groundwater from that sandstone aquifer would not contain health-threatening levels of radium.
Waukesha must be in full compliance with federal radium safe-water standards by June 2018, under a stipulation with the state Department of Natural Resources. Buying Lake Michigan water would allow Waukesha to close all of its existing deep sandstone wells and avoid radium treatment costs, Duchniak said.
Using Lake Michigan water in place of groundwater would benefit homeowners and businesses by eliminating the estimated $2.2 million a year those customers pay on their own for costs of softening to remove minerals, Duchniak said.
Though the entire city of Waukesha is outside the Great Lakes drainage basin, the compact allows the city to apply for use of lake water because it is within a county that straddles the basin boundary, known as a subcontinental divide.