Back in the late 1980s when I was working on an assignment with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, the executive director went public with a proposal to involve upstream communities in the watersheds of the city’s three rivers in efforts to control pollution that ultimately affected the city and Lake Michigan.
Well, judging from the reaction, it’s lucky for him the pillory had passed out of existence a couple of centuries earlier. A headline on a Milwaukee newspaper editorial pretty well summed it up the reaction: “City Hall Can’t Run the Region.” (The paper ascribed the proposal to city hall because
