East Dundee candidates at odds over water

Candidates for East Dundee village president are like oil and water when it comes to the capacity and supply of the village's aquifer.

Though both incumbent Village President Dan O'Leary and his challenger, former president Jerry Bartels, both say the underground water supply is an issue, the candidates differ on the extent.

"The village has had declining aquifers for years; they are not the same as they were five years ago," Bartels said. "When we turn on the wells to draw water from underground, we are basically five feet from sucking air. It has been that way for a long time."

Bartels said when he was elected village president in 2005, then public works director David Kitzmiller told village board members that a new water source was needed.

But O'Leary says while the village does keep close tabs on the water supply, the problem is not as dire as once thought. High rainfalls in the past few years have recharged the aquifers and the village drilled two wells to tap into the resource.

The village has spent about $1 million to dig the deep and shallow well in the Prairie Lakes industrial park. Another $4 million is needed to construct a water treatment facility proposed on the same site.

O'Leary said the village board pared down the project from $12 million.

"We were faced with the insistence that there was a water crisis that we had to deal with immediately," O'Leary said. "But it is not quite as big a deal as people had thought. The wells are not running dry and it was never a situation where we were told we were going to run out of water."