The Great Lakes Compact, which prevents bulk diversions of water, needs to get through the U.S. House this month. It has already gotten Senate approval, and President George W. Bush has indicated he will sign iFailure to move on the compact now risks having it linger, unfinished, until next year, when a new president and a new Congress will have to take it up from scratch. The process of getting it to the House floor has fallen to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to take it up Sept. 22.
The compact is not perfect. As with water use rules passed in Michigan at the same time, there is reason to continue working on ways to minimize export of pure water in containers of any size. But the compact does protect the lakes against water being sucked out in pipelines, or hauled off in ships or tanker trucks.
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Great Lakes water is vulnerable because the current legal framework would probably not stand up to court challenge. It allows any U.S. governor to veto a diversion for any reason -- certainly a welcome stance in Michigan, but one that could be easily shown to be an arbitrary and capricious legal standard. "Because I say so" generally isn't a persuasive argument to a judge.
The new compact ties the states together not only on requiring all governors to vote in favor of potential diversions, but with rules that govern requests for water -- specifically, the requirement that any bulk water leaving the basin must be returned. That works only for a few select municipalities just outside the watershed boundary, because they can pump their treated water back toward the lakes. It will not work for the dry agricultural regions in the central United States, for Southwestern cities, or for arid regions of the world that might cast an envious eye in this direction.
The compact makes it clear that all eight Great Lakes states and the two Canadian provinces, which have enacted companion legislation, intend to preserve and protect the water in the basin. The states cannot act as a consortium without Congress and the president also approving, which will make it even clearer to the rest of the country and the world that Great Lakes water is not up for grabs.
This is a major step in ensuring that Great Lakes water never gets treated as something that can be "mined" and hauled away but as the vital resource it
