News Updates

High stakes in the Great Lakes

More than an environmental asset, water is the economic infrastructure that will determine whether our region wins or loses over the next century.

Lake Michigan gives northeastern Illinois an extraordinary advantage: abundant, clean drinking water that has propelled our growth and shaped our identity. 

But this water abundance is not infinite nor guaranteed, it must be actively managed. Threats loom over the next several decades, and the region must plan and work together to surmount them.  

On the opportunity side, if we steward this valuable resource well, our region will thrive. Northeastern Illinois has the potential to be a global leader in part because of our water — the stakes are high.

This is why water is emerging as an important aspect of The Century Plan, a long-term vision for a stronger future for northeastern Illinois that is being guided by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). Long-term abundance will depend on how well we plan, coordinate, and invest.

“The water might feel limitless, but the systems that deliver our water across the region are not,” said Erin Aleman, CMAP’s Executive Director. “They depend on aging infrastructure. They also depend on sound governance. They depend on affordability for households and businesses, and we really need to depend on careful stewardship of our water resources, because those interconnected infrastructure resources that deliver the water to us day in and day out aren’t without their challenges.”

The high costs of fragmentation

Fragmentation, not scarcity, is one of the region’s biggest challenges. Water knows no boundaries, yet Illinois’ water governance system is highly fragmented, and water systems are often managed one community at a time.

Northeastern Illinois’ water network includes nearly 250 systems. Only 22 serve populations above 50,000, yet those systems serve about 4.5 million residents. The remaining systems serve roughly 4 million people. This creates a highly fragmented institutional landscape, where many separate systems must manage infrastructure, staffing, financing, and compliance responsibilities even though the region’s water resources and infrastructure are deeply interconnected.

At the same time, water service is uneven across the region, and some outer communities experience strain from dwindling groundwater supplies, aging infrastructure, and a lack of funds to make improvements. The region also is limited on how much water it can pull from Lake Michigan, and large industrial water users are considering Northeastern Illinois in greater numbers, further challenging the constraints on our water abundance.

To safeguard the area’s water advantage, significant change must occur in governance and water infrastructure.

Consolidating systems is an obvious option. But smaller systems can be reluctant, fearing a loss of local control. Larger systems often balk at incurring the substantial costs of upgrading and merging with smaller systems.

Better governance will build resilience

Long-term resilience requires the region to build shared capacity through coordination, partnerships, and new approaches to governance.

“In Chicagoland, you’ve got the talent, the infrastructure, and you’ve got the water,” said Manuel Teodoro, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Public Affairs who spoke at a CMAP event during 2026 Chicago Water Week. Teodoro is editor of the book, Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years. “What we need now is a better governance institution. Nothing else gets better without fixing this problem. Everything else is a Band-Aid.”

Small systems can be shored up with technical assistance and funding, he added, but that is unsustainable in the long run. A better option, his analysis shows, is consolidating systems, which could reduce administrative costs by more than $100 per customer per year for smaller utilities.

More ambitious approaches would include what Teodoro calls “hydrologically bounded citizenship,” which means designing water governance around how water systems naturally function — such as watersheds, river basins, or shared hydrological regions — rather than relying only on municipal boundaries. Another innovative approach from Australia uses citizen juries of randomly selected people to deliberate on major water use issues.

The water challenges that northeastern Illinois now faces took decades to materialize. Solving them will take patience and diligence.

Along with consolidating systems, transparency is an important step toward improving water systems’ performance. During a “Lakeside Chat” between Teodoro and Joel Brammeier, President and CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, Brammeier noted that transparency about water usage is critical for planning sustainable water consumption. Since water and sewer systems are underground, problems are not immediately apparent the way a pothole is; we need to make the invisible visible. Teodoro added that Wisconsin, for example, publishes report cards on hundreds of water utilities’ performances.

A region that leads on water

With access to a fifth of the world’s clean water supply, regional collaboration is the most effective way to address the significant changes coming to water systems in the Great Lakes Region and across the United States.

“We can either shape that change or let that change shape us,” Teodoro said. “We know the scale required for success. We know the kind of institutions we need to build. This might seem daunting. Might seem crazy. But this is a city that literally turned a river backwards. … Chicago has a way of making impossible, crazy things happen. So I’m very hopeful.”

Aleman is also encouraged that northeastern Illinois is positioned to maximize its water advantage.

“I know that this region has the right mix of stakeholders to really tackle this challenge,” she said, “and to do it in a way that is thoughtful, sustainable, and unleashes the economic creativity that our water can provide to our region from now into the next 100 years.”

“The Century Plan gives us an opportunity to collectively make some big bets about what the Chicagoland region will look like in the future,” said Kalindi Parikh, Strategy Director at Current, the organization that presents Chicago Water Week. “We believe that the Great Lakes Region, led by Chicago, has the right combination of assets to be a globally leading blue economy.”

Thank you to our Century Sponsors

Solving for tomorrow, today

The Century Plan is a shared, overarching vision for northeastern Illinois that will guide policies for transportation, the environment, and the economy for decades into the future.

Throughout 2026 and 2027, CMAP is bringing together regional decision-makers and action-takers from government, civic, business, and community organizations to think big about the challenges and opportunities facing northeastern Illinois. Together, we’ll set a path for systems that support transportation, the economy, and the environment — with priorities defined by the region, for the region. The journey is just beginning, and we invite you to join the conversation!