After decades of research, study and planning, the Lake Zurich Village Board voted to join the Central Lake County Joint Action Water Agency as the town plans to switch from well-supplied water to Lake Michigan water.
The board also voted at its March 18 meeting to approve finding the lowest cost route to making the change and for a ballot measure that could partly pay for the project through sales tax, if voters approve the referendum in November.
Public Works Director Mike Brown, long a supporter of the switch, said village staff and leaders have studied the village’s water supply issue from every angle and joining Lake Michigan is the only option that makes sense, both in terms of water quality and long-term cost.
“We’ve done our due diligence here,” he told the board. “We’ve done study after study after study and rightly so. That’s the difference that I can say probably wasn’t done to the fullest extent in the past, but it got us here today.”
The move to go with CLCJAWA was expected. Last year the board voted to begin collecting payments to connect to a Lake Michigan water supply. But the approval at the meeting capped the end of a process that first began in 1981.
CLCJAWA is a collection of communities that share the cost and the facilities necessary to use Lake Michigan as a water source. Lake Zurich currently uses local groundwater reservoirs. For the past 24 years, the town has paid to remove radium and to keep the naturally occurring radioactive element at regulation levels that were set in 2000.
Mayor Tom Poynton agreed the village was making the best decision.
“We’ve got the science down, we’ve got the money down, we’ve got the facility down,” he said. “It’s all well documented. … We’ve had how many meetings? Many. Many. We don’t have a presentation tonight, I don’t think one is needed.”
He said numerous presentations and studies are available for viewing on the village website.
The cost to make the change is expected to cost over $100 million, possibly as much as $150 million, over decades for infrastructure and planning costs to connect to a Lake Michigan water supply, according to village data about the project. But trustees insisted there’s no other option, explaining that the cost to mitigate and safely store the toxic waste from the well reservoirs would eventually outweigh the investment in CLCJAWA.
“What happened was, 40 years ago the can was kicked down the road,” said Trustee Marc Spacone. “What we’re doing here is making that hard step to say we’re not going to kick it down the road because it is the right decision for the village. … We have this challenge before us we absolutely have to face.”
He estimated the village had spent tens of thousands of hours on research, and he promised the future would bear out the decision of the current board.
“There are future Lake Zurich residents who will thank us for what we are doing here today,” Spacone said. “We are planting seeds today … at some point down the line some future generation will see the benefit from all of that.”
Additionally at the meeting, trustees approved establishing a referendum that will allow Lake Zurich residents to pass some of the cost of the project onto non-residents.
The ballot measure will go before voters in November to decide whether they would like to raise sales tax by half-a-cent to pay for the switch. Without that funding, the project will be wholly funded by water rate payers.
Village Manager Ray Keller said about 40% of the village’s sales tax revenue comes from visitors, so a slight hike in sales tax could save residents — and those who pay water bills — money on the project.
“Seventeen percent of the total cost (of the project) would be borne by non-residents,” should the voters approve the sales tax increase in November, Keller told the board. “This is not a vote committing the village to that rate, it will be totally at the voters’ discretion in November.”
Trustee Dan Bobrowski called it a “no brainer” for sharing the costs of implementing the water supply switch.
Jesse Wright is a freelancer.