One of the Mailings That Did In the Kiwhwaukee Valley Water Authority

Since I don’t live in the area that voted on the Kishwaukee Valley Water Authority I didn’t get any of the opposition’s mailings.

I heard about one from Joe Wiegand’s Taxpayers Alliance of Northern Illinois and asked for a copy.

On the outside is the corn crib with the “NO WATER AUTHORITY” sign painted on its side. I’ve run that picture on McHenry County Blog. The text under the sign is

Most farmers agree,
bad deals come in a hurry.

Maybe that’s an old agricultural saying, but I’ve never heard it before. There are a couple replications of his groups blue and white signs, too.

Inside this 4-page mailing are the

TOP TEN REASONS to VOTE NO on APRIL 17 on the
NON-ELECTED
Kishwaukee Valley Water
AUTHORITY!

I hope I can give you an idea of the effect of the different sizes of type.

Then, there’s what I assume is the same list of reasons that Wiegand handed out when he held his first round of press conferences.

Inside the message runs across two pages:

Your tax dollars are already hard at work on the issue of regional groundwater.

The 2-page spread has six maps.

With two of the maps one can look at aquifer lines for the Kishwaukee Valley with the boundaries of the Kishwaukee Valley Water Authority proposed by A-LAW, the Alliance for Land, Agriculture and Water. The Authority boundaries run primarily along straight township lines (see map on the lower right), while, of course, the underground water supplies in the aqufer (see map with blue to the other’s left) do not.

It argues with regional planning.

I would note that in the late 1960’s I attended a Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission hearing at Woodstock’s Opera House. That hearing lead to the finger plan of developing the six-county area.

Guess what?

If this plan to have growth follow the railroads out of Chicago had any effect, I can’t imagine what that effect was.

So, please excuse me if I think public officials whose elections are largely financed by developers will act in my lifetime to manage out underground water resources.

The Illinois Economic & Fiscal Commission wrote a report on water resource management in the 1970’s and recommended state legislation.

None passed.


Comments

One of the Mailings That Did In the Kiwhwaukee Valley Water Authority — 1 Comment

  1. I haven’t heard anything about NIPC for decades, but thought about them the very day I saw the article about Kishwaukee Valley Water Authority. If my memory serves, NIPC was one those busy little agencies in which busy little bureaucrats ran around to busy little meetings, the upshot of which was that suburbs whose water was so bad that it was infamous nationwide in the water industry couldn’t get Lake Michigan water so that they would have something to drink (and this was long before the days of ubiquitous bottled water)because NIPC didn’t approve, and suburbs that needed a new hospital couldn’t build one because NIPC didn’t approve.

    Such agencies — and they abound — are a preposterous way to “govern”, because letting some people with small minds and big agendae lord it over others who want nothing better than just to live, take care of their families, go to work, get home safely, and maybe have a beer in the evening, don’t need pea-brained nitwits telling them that they can’t have water or a hospital… especially water.

    And if Kishwaukee Valley Water AUTHORITY had been voted into existence, the misery would have begun immediately and would never have ended for residents of McHenry County. All those of you who wanted it and worked to get it on the ballot should move back to wherever you came from. Those who come from McHenry County should move somewhere where the water is bad and they can’t get NIPC’s permission to get Lake Michigan water. If you haven’t been there, try it before you foist it onto others.

    Quickly folks, we should see to it that such an item never again comes to a vote because next time it might pass and then we’re going to be sorry.

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