The West Lafayette City Council voted unanimously Monday to approve a resolution in opposition to the construction of a pipeline to divert water from a Wabash River aquifer to a planned advanced manufacturing district in Boone County.
Its passage comes less than a week after the Indiana Economic Development Corp., the quasi-public state agency behind the plan, released the results of its commissioned study concluding that an aquifer connected to the river contains enough water to support the planned LEAP Lebanon Innovation District without depriving the Lafayette region of adequate water supply. (LEAP stands for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace.)
The resolution will be sent to the Tippecanoe County Commissioners office, state lawmakers who represent Tippecanoe County, Gov. Eric Holcomb and Indiana Secretary of Commerce David Rosenberg. It states that the IEDC planned the pipeline “in secret” and the LEAP district “without ensuring that there were sufficient resources for the industries that they wished to recruit there.”
“Opposition to this pipeline goes across the political spectrum,” said David Sanders, a Democratic city councilor who sponsored the resolution and an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. “This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue from community members coming together to protect their local resource.”
City council members and local officials who echoed Sanders’ concerns expressed a desire for more research from third parties and greater transparency from IEDC officials, who they said have not approached them about the plan.
“There is seldom we know about our aquifer,” said West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis. “We have never received any information about the flow rate. We have never received any information about the replenishment rate. Those are really questions that need to be asked and answered.”
The IEDC commissioned INTERA, a Texas-based environmental consulting firm, to study a 70-acre area above the Wabash Alluvial Aquifer to determine whether a plan to withdraw as much as 100 million gallons of water per day was feasible. The water would then be transported via a roughly 35-mile pipeline to support advanced manufacturing operations in the LEAP district.
Intera concluded that its two test wells could support a maximum pumping rate of 45 million gallons daily, meaning that more wells would need to be drilled to reach the 100 million-gallon -per-day threshold.
An IEDC spokesperson said the agency will continue to release information from future test sites as it becomes available.
The IEDC also said it plans to have all of its water testing results peer-reviewed by Indiana University, Purdue University and Ohio State University.
State lawmakers are drafting legislation that would create a permitting process and a deeper review of such huge water diversions. Rep. Sharon Negele, R-Attica, is working with Sen. Spencer Deery, R-Lafayette, to draft the bill and secure a committee hearing for the proposal next year. A similar measure earlier this year was denied a hearing.
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