Delegates from eight Great Lakes states on Tuesday approved Waukesha, Wis.’s request to begin using Lake Michigan as a water supply.
The decision, which was unanimous, allows the Milwaukee suburb of 70,000 to to divert water from the lake and use it for drinking water, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
{mosads}Waukesha’s request was more than a decade in the making. The city is required to reduce the amount of radium in its drinking water supply by 2018, and the wells it currently uses as a are contaminated with radium, the Journal-Sentinel explains.
In order to pump water from Lake Michigan, the city had to petition the eight states aligned with the Great Lakes Compact, a law providing the states bordering the lakes with joint water management power.
The city applied for the diversion in 2010, and state regulators reviewed the request for six years before passage on Tuesday.
Waukesha becomes the first state outside of the Great Lakes drainage basin to receive a water diversion, a fact that itself necessitated the need to to go the Great Lakes Compact states for approval.
The states adopted a handful of amendments to the water agreement on Tuesday, including one setting a cap of 8.2 million gallons of diverted water a day by midcentury, less than what the city had wanted.
An amendment from Minnesota representatives would give any single Great Lakes state the chance to enforce compliance measures against Waukesha; Michigan officials proposed and passed an amendment requiring performance audits of the city’s water utilities.