AG's sewage lawsuit stinks

The Journal Sentinel weighs in today with an editorial on AG Peg Lautenschlager's wrong-headed lawsuit against the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Maybe there will be some political benefit to this stunt outstate, but it is playing badly in Milwaukee,, and opposition is bipartisan, from Mayor Tom Barrett to Republican radio hosts.

From today's editorial, titled,"Suit on dumping simply wrong":

State Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager filed suit Thursday against the taxpayers of Milwaukee County to get them to spend more money than they're already spending on sewage cleanup. The suit is disguised as a case against the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, but the reality is that Lautenschlager
is demanding that taxpayers fork out more money to fix one aspect of a complicated problem that would result in a marginal improvement in water quality.

Lautenschlager is asking a judge to tell the district to upgrade its system to stop future dumping of sewage into Lake Michigan. But the district is already working to upgrade its system: It has allocated $900 million for sewer projects and is in the middle of a $58 million long-range planning effort aimed at identifying still other improvements. That's not small change, and it will result in improvements.

Can the district do more to reduce the amount of partially treated sewage that is dumped into the lake? Yup. ShouldUnited Water Services and district officials be held to account for any mistakes in operations or judgment that result in unnecessary dumpings? Absolutely. But if the idea is to build a new system aimed at stopping all dumping, that's a) probably not possible, given the nature of Mother Nature and b) prohibitively expensive, to the point of draining the budgets of municipalities and taxpayers in the district.

We doubt very much that, given the current tax climate, paying for a system that would end all overflows or virtually all overflows would sit well with taxpayers...

... Lautenschlager ... apparently wants taxpayers to spend billions more on a "solution" that won't make the waters very much cleaner. That's not serving the citizens of Wisconsin.

Earlier post: Lautenschlager grandstands,taxpayers pay.