The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will hold a public hearing next Monday to clear confusion regarding a university Lagoon permit.
Members of the Northwestern community will be able to voice their concerns about the university’s request to renew a permit allowing the discharge of water from NU’s cooling pond, also known as the Lagoon, into Lake Michigan.
The Illinois EPA’s Bureau of Water is holding the public hearing because there is some confusion as to whether the discharge permit is part of a proposal to fill in four acres of the Lagoon, said Joan Muraro, a spokeswoman for the Illinois EPA.
“There still seems to be a great deal of public interest with anything affecting the Lagoon right now,” she said. “There were some requests for a public hearing.”
Muraro said NU’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit must be renewed every five years.
But NU’s request to renew the discharge permit has nothing to do with the university’s proposal to fill in a portion of the Lagoon that was announced last year, said Charles Loebbaka, a university spokesman.
“This is a standard procedure for renewing our permit,” Loebbaka said. “It goes way back into the 1960s.”
The hearing will take place in the Technological Institute’s Peck Auditorium at 2 p.m., and anyone can present written and oral testimony. It will reconvene at 6:30 p.m. for anyone to submit additional comments.
Created in 1968, the cooling pond is located east of NU’s central utility plant, which converts water from Lake Michigan into chilled water used for air conditioning university buildings, Loebakka said.
After students expressed outrage at the prospect of filling in part of the Lagoon, Eugene Sunshine, NU’s senior vice president for business and finance, said NU withdrew its construction permit to fill in the four acres, a project the Illinois EPA had approved.
“In order to make sure there was no confusion about that in the public eye, we gave our permit back,” Sunshine said. “If we ever intended to proceed with that project, we would have to reapply for it.”
There are no plans to reapply for the construction permit at this time, Sunshine added.
