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player ready...Nothing like gazing at a cool Lake Michigan to take the sting out of a hot and hazy August day. Wading in the blue water is even better.
The environmental health of the Big Lake in this summer of 2025 is so far removed from what it looked like more than 50 years ago. That’s when the old North Shore Sanitary District would regularly pump barely treated effluent from its Waukegan shoreline plant into the lake.
That practice left oily scum on beaches, along with various solids. With much federal and state funding to build facilities to direct sewage from the lake, it is a rare occurrence that practice happens these days.
The crumbling shoreline at Illinois Beach State Park is having its first full summer since the landmark, $73 million stabilization project — the largest capital investment in the history of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources — was completed under budget last fall. Funded through Gov. JB Pritzker’s vaunted Rebuild Illinois capital plan, the stabilization project tackled erosion that had for years threatened the state’s last fully natural Lake Michigan shoreline.
While hailed by many environmentalists for preserving a vital ecological and recreational resource after years of neglect, the anti-erosion project has generated another issue: Drawing people back to the state park which has resulted in a number of water rescues.
Yet, the project can be considered one of several wins, including artificial reefs off Illinois Beach and Fort Sheridan in Highland Park, for the lake’s fragile ecosystem. Some wonder how long the winning streak will continue under machinations by the administration of President Donald Trump to cull environmental efforts.
Like the waves that frequently batter Lake Michigan, protections from inside and outside the lake could be just as easily washed away by Trump’s minions. The administration is seeking to roll back more than two dozen environmental rules and policies, some of which have been in effect for decades.
The administration last month indicated officials will dismantle U.S. greenhouse gas regulations, essentially overturning the finding that pollution from greenhouse gases endangers the health of Americans. If eventually put into law, the U.S. would end limits on greenhouse gas emissions from the tailpipes of autos and trucks, fossil-fueled power plants and other polluters.
In 2009, during the administration of President Barack Obama, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labeled carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dangerous to public health, the so-called “endangerment finding.” Members of the Trump administration reject that decision and other issues the president dislikes.
After all, if one can replace an economist after being dissatisfied with a monthly jobs report, cut 600 jobs from the all-important National Weather Service or yank federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which metes out money to local public media operations and bulldoze the White House Rose Garden, just about anything’s fair game inside the Trump camp.
Like regulations to cart coal-ash contamination away from the site of the old ComEd coal-fired generating station at the north end of Waukegan’s lakeshore. The coal-ash ponds at the decommissioned power plant off Pershing Road, south of Greenwood Avenue, now owned by Houston-based utility giant NRG Energy, have vexed city officials, state lawmakers and area environmentalists.
NRG representatives for years have resisted calls to excavate the ponds and take the toxic mix of heavy metals off-site to safe landfills far from the chief source of drinking water for most of Lake County’s residents. “They’ve done nothing except intensely lobby against legislation,” state Rep. Rita Mayfield, D-Gurnee, told Steven Sadin in a July 11 front-page News-Sun story.
In 2021, Mayfield and state Sen. Adriane Johnson, D-Buffalo Grove, introduced a bill in the legislature that would force NRG to remove the ponds. The bill has been hung up in the Illinois House.
The Illinois Pollution Control Board in a June 25 ruling denied the company’s latest ploy, seeking a stay of an earlier IPCB decision which it has appealed to the Second District Appellate Court sitting in Elgin. According to Sadin’s story, the IPCB stated: “A stay would impose a considerable hardship on the public…”
Indeed, the board noted there is “a demonstrated source of groundwater contamination” on the NRG site. Why NRG has been intransigent over cleansing the site only their corporate officers and engineers know.
The company should be a good corporate neighbor and get rid of the legacy lethal material on the property left behind by the former power-generating process. Radioactive waste from the former ComEd Nuclear Generating Station in Zion yards from the shoreline doesn’t need another poisonous lakefront companion with the potential to taint Lake Michigan.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
X: @sellenews
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