Candidates for commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District usually don’t have Web sites, don’t march in the Gay Pride Parade, and don’t receive endorsements from Democracy for America meetups. The board of commissioners is typically filled by Democratic organization veterans and longtime district employees, and campaigning typically means buttering up the committeemen who do the slating, passing out yard signs, and hoping your name comes first on the ballot.
Shore stood on a porch step and began her stump speech. Petite, with close-cropped hair and almond eyes, she speaks in precise sentences and with just a hint of a Texas drawl. Her speech was a somewhat strange mix of boilerplate–who she is and why she’d do a good job–and a crash course in what the MWRD does and why the assembled should care. “Over the next 20 or 25 years we are going to find substitutes for oil–there are substitutes for fossil fuels,” she said. “There are no substitutes for fresh drinking water. It’s an irreplaceable resource. And I think the eyes of the country and the eyes of the world are going to turn to those Great Lakes communities that sit on 20 percent of the world’s freshwater.”
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In 1889 the state legislature passed a bill creating the Chicago Metropolitan Sanitary District. (In 1988 commissioner James Kirie, frustrated by the public’s lack of understanding of what the district did, pushed the board to change its name to the no less baffling Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.) The district’s first task was to reverse the river so that it flowed away from the lake and into the Mississippi watershed, where the wastewater could become someone else’s problem. The pathway established in the late 19th century is essentially the one used today. Wastewater goes down the drain, through city pipes, and into the district’s sewage system. It’s pumped into treatment centers–there are seven, including the one in Stickney, the largest in the world–where it is, in the words of president Terry O’Brien, “made 99.99 percent pure” before being released. It flows through the Sanitary & Ship Canal to the Des Plaines to the Illinois and finally to the Mississippi River.
For the civil engineers at the MWRD the solution was simple: massively scale up the holding capacity. They proposed the Tunnel and Reservoir Project (TARP), known commonly as Deep Tunnel, an enormous system of underground tunnels and reservoirs that would store excess storm water during even the heaviest rains until it could be processed.
Eventually Skokie gave Shore and her partner a variance to build their gravel driveway. But by then the stock market had gone back down and they couldn’t afford it.
In 1996 a group of conservationists launched a regional consortium dedicated to preserving and helping manage local wildlife habitats. The Chicago Region Biodiversity Council (better known as Chicago Wilderness) had 34 founding organizations, including the U.S. Forest Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, the Chicago Park District, the Sierra Club, and the Nature Conservancy. Shore was approached by Steve Packard, one of the consortium’s leaders, about helping to put together a new magazine. She ended up the editor. Says Packard, “She was a little like Cheney helping Bush find a vice president.”
