State and Regional Water Supply Planning in Illinois: Ensuring Adequate and Reliable Supplies of Clean Water at Reasonable Cost for All Users

              State
and Regional
Water-Supply
Planning in
Illinois
Ensuring adequate and reliable supplies of clean
water at reasonable cost for all users
Almost 16 billion gallons of water are used in Illinois each day in industries,
agriculture, domestic consumption, commerce, and energy production,
with over 2 billion gallons daily withdrawn and not returned to the source.
Individuals consume an average of about 150 gallons of water each day from
public water supplies.
Due to projected growth of the population and economy, Illinois could require
20 to 50 percent more water in coming decades. We also need to sustain healthy
populations of fish and aquatic wildlife and wetlands, and to support recreation
and navigation in rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs. Ensuring adequate and
reliable supplies of clean water for all users at reasonable cost requires us to
think ahead to the year 2050. As a state, we need to know how much water will
be available, how much water we will need, what the options are for providing
additional supplies, reducing demand and what the impacts and costs will be.
In January 2006, Governor Rod Blagojevich signed Executive Order 2006-01,
requiring the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) to lead the state
and regional water-supply planning activities. Within IDNR, the Office of Water
Resources (OWR) is to coordinate with the Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) to
define a comprehensive program for state and regional water-supply planning
and management.
To begin that effort, the State has selected two areas for priority pilot studies.
A northeastern Illinois regional water-supply planning group will focus on the
deep bedrock aquifer that underlies all of northeastern Illinois and all the
water resources within and beneath the Fox River basin, and surface waters
in that region. Activities of these committees will be coordinated at the state
level, with facilitation at the regional level by Chicago Metropolitan Agency for
Planning (CMAP) in northeastern Illinois and the Mahomet Aquifer Consortium
(MAC) in east-central Illinois. CMAP and MAC will form their respective regional
planning groups, each of which will address groundwater, surface water, and
climate variability and change.
A coordinated,
statewide
approach to regional water-supply planning
The need for water-supply planning