State Money A Good Start; Won't Make Chicago River A Swimming Hole Anytime Soon

By JoshMogerman in News on Apr 14, 2012 8:05PM

Now that the row over making the Chicago River clean enough to row in is over, attention has turned to funding sources for the river’s rennaisance. Thursday, Governor Quinn announced that the State of Illinois would pitch $10 million towards the effort to disinfect the waterway. The grant covers about half the cost for engineering and design work on the effort to revamp Metropolitan Water Reclamation District facilities to eliminate the dumping of “pathogen-filled sewage” water, according to Crain’s Greg Hinz.

New leadership at MWRD seems to have earned the State’s trust with an enthusiastic embrace of the disinfection effort. The Trib notes that the timeline and price tag to address the District’s treatment plants, which dump water that makes up 70% of the flow in parts of the river, have changed significantly in recent months:

The entire project is expected to cost $139 million, about 14 percent of the $1 billion that officials at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District once said it would require. They now say they can build the germ-killing equipment by 2015 within the district's normal budget and without a tax increase.

But if you think you will be taking a dip in the river soon after the project is complete, like Medill, the Sun-Times and Governor Quinn all seem to imply, you better slow your roll.

The State’s announcement is great news, but it isn’t magic.

This project is a major step forward, putting northern Illinois and the Chicago River system in line with basic water practices employed almost everywhere else in the U.S. (and most of the world), but a century of managing the river like a sewer has taken a toll. Besides, MWRD, the City and many other communities along the waterway still dump raw sewage into the river with every big rainstorm when combined sewers overflow. While the Clean Water Act’s goal is to make American waterways “fishable and swimmable,” that doesn’t mean there will be diving boards off of Trump Tower anytime soon (as NRDC attorney Ann Alexander notes in a blog about how that standard plays out here). Still, reducing the threat of violent illness from contact with the river will surely help turn it into the amenity Chicagoans expect.