Here & Now

Noon Wednesday with guest Scott Gordon

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to Noon Wednesday. I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia journalist with Here & Now on Wisconsin Public Television. Joining me today is Scott Gordon. You might recognize him from previous episodes. He’s from our partners at WisContext, and he’s been doing some reporting about the potential downstream impacts from the Foxconn development, and Scott, thanks so much for being here.

Scott Gordon:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

So let’s start with talking about what is already happening downstream.

Scott Gordon:

Well a lot of the concerns revolve around the Des Plaines River, which starts kind of in southern Racine County and flows down to Illinois, sort of through the exurbs of Chicago, eventually flowing into the Illinois River. And basically part of the Foxconn campus is in that watershed, and there’s worries that it’ll kind of exacerbate flooding downstream and in areas like Lake County, Illinois, which is north of Cook County, where Chicago is, there’s you know concerns about that getting worse, especially because over the last few years they’ve had some pretty bad flooding, with you know pretty considerable damage, and I believe in 2016 there were some records set in flooding along that river.

Marisa Wojcik:

And the watersheds are connected from where the Foxconn development is to where this Des Plaines watershed is.

Scott Gordon:

Right, basically part of the development is in the Des Plaines watershed, which means water will be draining eventually into that.

Marisa Wojcik:

Foxconn was approved to fill these wetlands in, so was that considered when they were making those plans?

Scott Gordon:

I’m not really clear on that. The state and an organization called SEWRPC, which has done kind of a study about the potential downstream impacts and basically concluded that there shouldn’t be a problem if the Village of Mount Pleasant where the factory is kind of sticks to its existing plans when it comes to storm water management. We’ve been looking into that and some of the storm water officials in Lake County, Illinois are kind of trying to do their own independent review of that and we don’t have their findings yet. But one potential issue with the SEWRPC study is that it takes rain data from the past basically to project what might happen in the future, and an issue with that is that thanks to climate change we’re expected to have more rain and more extreme rainfall events in the upper Midwest going forward, and so admittedly it’s kind of hard to incorporate some of those projections and scale them down to this one very specific geographic area, but it does raise the question of, does this really tell us what to expect in the future?

Marisa Wojcik:

Mm-hmm, and Foxconn has to replace the wetlands that it is filling in for the site.

Scott Gordon:

Right, so the Wisconsin DNR has this program where people who are filling in wetlands basically pay into a fund and then DNR sort of puts out contracts, requests for work from that funds, where new wetlands are built to sort of offset the damage and most of the laws that have been passed around Foxconn give it a pretty wide berth in terms of environmental regulations, but the state did kind of add in a requirement that they mitigate two acres for every one acre that they fill, which is a little stricter than the overall state standard. The kind of questioned is where do these new wetlands go and do they make up for the impacts that the filled-in wetlands were having and does it happen fast enough.

Marisa Wojcik:

Where do these wetlands go, the artificial replacement wetlands?

Scott Gordon:

Well I don’t know specifically and they haven’t really announced you know, specific plans around that, but basically for the purposes of this program the DNR sort of divides the state up into like a dozen sort of macro watersheds I suppose, for lack of a better term, and so the mitigation would have to be in one of those, it’s just not necessarily clear if it would have to be in the Des Plaines River watershed specifically, you know to mitigate for something that impacts that specific watershed.

Marisa Wojcik:

Mm-hmm, and in your reporting there’s also some evidence that there might not be room in that area for more wetlands, it’s kind of a very developing area.

Scott Gordon:

Yeah I mean there’s just concerns that well, where do you put this just because it’s such a rapidly developing and already quite kind of urbanized and built out area of the state. I mean I don’t honestly know specifically yet from my reporting how hard it would be to find a good site for that, but that’s definitely a concern and you know, officials in Lake County, Illinois really want to know specifically where this mitigation is going to happen and how it’s going to correspond to the impact of the construction.

Marisa Wojcik:

So the wetlands that they’re filling in are natural wetlands and then they’re being replaced with artificial wetlands. Are artificial wetlands a good substitute for what naturally formed wetlands, for the functions that they perform?

Scott Gordon:

Well they can be, it’s just that if you know an artificial wetland is in a different location, then it might inevitably kind of have a different hydrologic effect on how it interacts with the water that’s flowing through the landscape. You know it’s not clear whether they’re going to be able to do a mitigation project that will exactly correspond with the functions that Foxconn kind of takes out of the system, and in kind of figuring out what to do the state will have to consider not just the impact of Foxconn’s construction, but you know all the other development that’s affecting wetlands in that area.

Marisa Wojcik:

Should Wisconsin care if Illinois is impacted?

Scott Gordon:

I suppose, I mean they’re our neighbors and you know, I mean there was kind of a whole funny thing when the Foxconn deal was announced, where people were kind of joking that well, this is going to give a lot of people in Illinois jobs and without Illinois having to pay into it. You know of course there’s the possibility that Illinois could sue Wisconsin or sue the EPA. They haven’t actually done that yet, but they’ve talked about doing that over various issues with the Foxconn plant.

Marisa Wojcik:

And Illinois is also a part of the Great Lakes Compact, does that factor into this at all or is that more so based on kind of water being drawn from Lake Michigan?

Scott Gordon:

There are some, they have kind of raised concerns about, Illinois has raised concerns about Foxconn’s use of Lake Michigan water. Of course the Des Plaines kind of represents the part of the project that’s in the Mississippi River Basin because that’s where it eventually flows to, but yeah Illinois has kind of raised concerns about specifically waste water coming out of the Foxconn plant that’ll be discharged into Lake Michigan and you know, whether that will be up to standards.

Marisa Wojcik:

Have we seen evidence of how a lack of wetlands in other areas has impacted concerns about flooding and various things in other parts of the United States?

Scott Gordon:

Yeah absolutely, there have been various studies done about places including like New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy and Houston after the hurricanes this past summer about how wetlands have actually kind of helped to reduce some of the damages that floods can do. I mean obviously you can still have a big catastrophic storm with flooding, but you know if you have wetlands in the right places that gives some of that water a place to go and can slow down its impact on the broader landscape. So yeah it has been empirically shown that wetlands can play a big role in sort of guarding against extreme floods.

Marisa Wojcik:

So right now we’re kind of stuck in an area where we have to just kind of wait and see. We don’t know with data about how storms are getting more intense and rainwater is falling more intensely and just the plant hasn’t been built yet, so we kind of have to wait and see.

Scott Gordon:

Right and you know I was talking about the SEWRPC study earlier and the potential challenges of taking the projections that do exist about future rainfall and so forth and applying it to that area and along with that they have to necessarily kind of make some assumptions about what Foxconn will do and you know can’t necessarily predict what all that will look like either.

Marisa Wojcik:

Yeah okay. Alright well thanks so much Scott.

Scott Gordon:

Thank you.

Marisa Wojcik:

And we’ll look forward to more reporting on this. I’m sure there’s more to come. Thank you so much for joining us. If you want to hear more or read more from our partners and from Scott Gordon’s reporting visit WisContext.org. For more from Here & Now and Wisconsin Public Television visit wpt.org and please make sure to share this interview out and leave your comments below and thank you so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.