review. Years later, sending water across the Basin line and then re-

turning it would be seen as a diversion that required a unanimous

vote by all eight Great Lakes governors (see chapter 10.) But for

the time being, the LakeView project managed to squeak through

without further consideration.

Even before the LakeView development was built, the Kenosha

Water Utility had been diverting water outside the Great Lakes

Basin since 1964. With roughly 20 percent of the city lying outside

the Basin line, the utility continued to add customers to the Lake

Michigan water system long after WRDA was passed. Each time

Kenosha’s water service was expanded outside the Basin, the Wis-

consin DNR approved the extensions without requiring the city to

submit its water application for review by the other governors. “Did

we continue to add customers? Absolutely,” says Edward St. Peter,

general manager of the Kenosha Water Utility, adding that as far as

he could tell, Wisconsin officials didn’t consider what he was doing

to be a diversion—as long as the sewage came back. But he ac-

knowledged that not everyone in the Great Lakes region shared

Wisconsin’s interpretation. “Other states, especially Michigan, felt

that any water that went out [of the Basin] was a diversion,” he

says, which led to a debate about “what’s a diversion? . . . I’d like to

see something in writing that says what a diversion is.” The legal

language in WRDA didn’t answer that question, and if a water

withdrawal with return-flow constituted a diversion, “then what we

were doing was illegal,” says St. Peter.

While Kenosha continued to operate under the radar, Pleasant

Prairie was not so lucky. Michigan continued to have serious reser-

vations abut Pleasant Prairie’s proposal, and the village’s own con-

sultant worried the LakeView water deal could derail the diversion’s

approval. George Loomis was a Lansing lobbyist whom Pleasant

Prairie had paid $30,000 to help get its water application approved

in Michigan. In a confidential memo to the village on September

29, 1989, he warned of “significant problems down the road should

the future water use of the LakeView Corporate Park ever be

claimed to constitute a diversion of water from the Great Lakes

P l e a s i n g   P l e a s a n t   P r a i r i e

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