Michigan

Great Lakes, Great Michigan: Weaknesses in the New Water Laws

While new laws began regulating large quantity water withdrawals, which are defined as withdrawals over 100,000 gallons per day over any 30 day period, these laws have weaknesses.

Harming Public Trust
The water legislation that passed in 2006 placed Michigan's water at greater risk of privatization for two reasons:

  1. Water packaged in containers 5.7 gallons or smaller is defined as a so-called "consumptive use" and is therefore exempt from the definition of a Great Lakes diversion or export. This is the first statutorily protected diversion of Great Lakes water in the U.S. since the Chicago River Diversion in 1894. This seemingly harmless exemption could give international companies and governments the opening they need to begin privatizing our waters beginning with small containers. It is illegal to fill a ship or a tanker truck with water and take it outside of the Great Lakes Basin but you can fill that same ship or truck with small containers of water and export it from the Great Lakes.

  2. Michigan's waters are to be held in trust by the government through what is known as the "public trust doctrine." The waters are not to be given away to anyone–especially not to those seeking to profit by selling our waters. The new laws essentially removed the public trust from water in containers 5.7 gallons or smaller.

The definition of harm to our waters is too narrowly defined
As previously described, the definition of an adverse resource impact applies to "characteristic fish populations."

Enforceable water efficiency standards are lacking
The new laws only require industries to develop best management practices by large water user group. There is no requirement under the new law that these practices actually be used.

Next Steps

We advocate passage of The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact, an interstate agreement between the eight Great Lakes states which must be adopted by each state legislature and ratified by Congress, with strong implementing legislation and believe it presents a critical opportunity to improve our current state laws. We propose the Great Lakes, Great Michigan 2007 platform as a supplement to the Compact.

Take the next step: learn more about what you can do to help protect Michigan's water resources and fight climate change.