The City of Waukesha, WI, is the first municipality under a 2008 Compact among eight states and two Canadian provinces to apply for permission to divert water outside the Great Lakes basin.
Waukesha's May, 2010 application, however, is stalled because the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has twice labeled it deficient.
And now a related plan by the City to obtain water-rich property in the adjoining Town of Waukesha is under legal challenge.
All of which illustrates how difficult it is to gain access to water these days. Further update, below.
The City of Waukesha's complex efforts to access a new water supply by a June, 2018 deadline have run into a legal challenge on its border - - details, links and maps here - - that shows how difficult it is to tap into water that is under someone else's land or control.
The immediate issue is whether the City of Waukesha, having over-pumped the deep well water beneath the City's lands, can, through eminent domain, pump water from its neighbor, the smaller, more rural Town of Waukesha.
But the City is also involving the Town in the application for Great Lakes water by declaring in its application that it wants to send Lake Michigan water into portions of the Town.
I suspect that the Town will resist that, first because so far, the City has not asked the Town whether it wants to be added to that newly-expanded water delivery area, and secondly because the Town knows with expanded water service will come annexations, development, roads, services-and-tax consequences, and lifestyle changes.
Few outside the City of Waukesha - - such as the regulators and analysts in the seven other Great Lakes states (and on a purely advisory basis, the Canadians) who must unanimously agree if Waukesha is to win diversion permission - - will care if the City wants Lake Michigan water to fuel land and economic expansion.
And the City of Waukesha will have to convince the likely Lake Michigan water supplier - - the City of Milwaukee - - that it will not suffer an outflow of jobs and capital if the City of Waukesha buys Lake Michigan water in part for its expansion.
The City of Waukesha has embarked on a water conservation plan to both save water and make its water acquisition plans more palatable.
But it may have to enhance those plans and reduce the amount of waer it seeks in the short run from the neighboring Town, or in the longer run from Milwaukee, or face obstacles to the supplies it seeks that are insurmountable.