LANSING ? Michigan House Great Lakes and Environment Committee Chair Rep. Rebekah Warren (D-Ann Arbor) said Tuesday that she intends to begin voting at the committee’s regular meeting Wednesday on a package of bills to implement the Great Lakes Compact.
So far the House package has drawn fire from business groups as placing too many restrictions on water use, while a package in the Senate slated to move from committee next week with hearings on the actual legislation Wednesday has been slammed by environmental groups as not providing enough protection for the resource.
The House committee did not discuss the bills themselves Tuesday, but received an overview of the water use assessment tool developed under the current water use acts.
The task force created two measures: a screening tool soon to be available on the Internet that gives general idea if a proposed well or water intake would harm a river or stream and a site assessment tool that would look more closely at the specifics of a site and a proposed water use to determine if it should be allowed.
Officials with the departments of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources said the tools are essentially an amalgam of a number of measures of water flow to determine the health affects on fish populations.
“Our approach really leans heavily on a set of scientific thoughts that flow is the central variable to an ecosystem,” said Paul Seelbach, research director for the DNR Fisheries Division.
And he said fish population is a legitimate measure of changes in water flow. “Fish is the most commonly used indicator,” he said. “They can’t be there unless there’s good habitat and food and adequate water quality.”
The group used a variety of data to show, in a given stream, how a set reduction in water flow would affect fish populations.
Though the group had set some initial criteria for determining when a water withdrawal was too large, Frank Ruswick, senior policy advisor for the DEQ, said it was up to the Legislature to set the cut points that represented too much damage to a stream.
The Legislature also needs to decide when a withdrawal is large enough to require a permit and how long that permit is valid.
Ruswick said it will be essential for the Legislature to provide sufficient funding to maintain the assessment tool. “It’s pretty slick but if we don’t support it, it’s not going to meet its potential benefits,” he said.
He noted, for instance, that the tool in its current state could tell if a particular well would harm a stream, but it would need to have a database of those permitted wells, and their actual draw, to determine if the cumulative affect of several wells would be harmful. The tool also could, but does not now, take into account how much of the water withdrawn is put back into the aquifer, for example through irrigation.
He noted that the tool itself showing that a proposed withdrawal would not be harmful may not be sufficient to allow a well. “Someone could still argue a use is unreasonable,” he said.
Ruswick said it would also be up the Legislature what role community input would have in permitting new high-volume wells.
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