There is an old saying among urban planners that sewers are destiny.
More than the building of a road, running a high-capacity interceptor sewer into the countryside all but predetermines what will happen along its route. Lay a 60-inch-diameter line and you’ve set the stage for a Woodfield Mall. Lay no sewer and you’ve determined an area will remain sparsely developed–as a wetland, perhaps, a golf course or a forest preserve.
In northern Illinois, the governmental process that decides where sewers go and how big they’ll be is invisible to most people. These matters are hotly debated, however, among suburban officials, developers and longtime residents in the path of new growth. Since the early 1970s, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has refereed a process in which real-estate developers shop their proposals among municipalities along the suburban fringe. The developers seek annexation on favorable terms and, with it, the vital water and sewer connections that make possible their subdivisions and office parks.
In order to bring some order to this process–to identify which suburbs logically ought to provide service to which areas–the state runs something called a Facility Planning Area system. State maps are drawn of future service areas, often taking into account the planning objectives of municipalities, counties and the regional Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
Recently, after several testy disputes over which suburb was supposed to annex which development, Illinois EPA officials declared they want out of the catbird seat. They’d rather limit their judgments to issues of water quality and let competing suburbs–perhaps grouped by “watershed” areas–fight it out over such issues as open space and traffic management. IEPA officials argue, with some justification, that their agency was never set up to adjudicate such land-use decisions.
Regional watchdogs like the Metropolitan Planning Council are waving caution flags, however. With no other unified process to determine which parts of exurbia are to get sewers and from which municipality, civic groups fear developers will play one suburb against another as never before. A coalition led by the Planning Council has called for a complete review of the proposed changes, which they warn “will be a step backward for sensible growth in our region.”
The Illinois EPA owes the people of the Chicago region at least that much. Unregulated suburban sprawl is ugly, wasteful and costly to everyone in the region in ways both obvious and hidden. Better methods are needed to guide regional growth. Until they are in place, IEPA must not abandon the field.
