Village explores water options

The Hawthorn Woods village board Monday night agreed to find out if Lake Michigan water could be an option for its residents.

Mayor Keith Hunt said the village's dependency on deep water aquifers, which cannot be replenished, needs to be examined.

"There still are some risks and some uncertainties (with a deep aquifer)," Hunt said. "What this really is, is not something that is either-or. It's something that's in addition to (wells)."

With its decision, the village joins a string of Lake County communities in researching if and at what cost residents could connect to water from Lake Michigan.

Earlier this month, Long Grove approved the same $8,000 study by Applied Technologies, an Oak Brook engineering firm, to determine if and how they could hook up to Lake Michigan water.

And the Northern Lake County Lake Michigan Water Planning Group, which includes Lake County, Antioch, Lindenhurst, Lake Villa, Old Mill Creek, Fox Lake and Wauconda, commissioned a study that showed in September it would cost about $178 million to bring Lake Michigan water to those communities.

Hunt said the village should move on approving a study quickly, while allocation of Lake Michigan water is still available.

"It's sort of an issue of timing," he said. "It would seem to me that this is really part of us planning for our infrastructure."

Most homes in Hawthorn Woods use private wells, which have at times turned troublesome. Residents in the Glennshire Hawthorn Woods water system were hit with the news late last year that they would have to pay millions of dollars to overhaul their 20 county-owned wells. The 224 homeowners have fought ever since to determine what new water system will replace it and how much they will be forced to pay.

It's not clear how much any future Lake Michigan water source could aid the Glennshire homeowners, who have to come up with a solution before any potential link-up could be created.

"This is still quite a ways off," Trustee Cliff Wright said.