As governors and premiers of Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces on Thursday started reviewing Waukesha's request for a Lake Michigan water supply, Wisconsin environmental regulators said the city does not have a reasonable alternative.

Waukesha, located just west of Milwaukee, cannot meet state and federal restrictions on radium in drinking water from its current groundwater sources, and the city does not have adequate supplies of potable water, the Department of Natural Resources says in documents submitted Thursday to the eight states and two provinces.

Representatives of those state and provincial governments participated Thursday in a webinar briefing of the application. The representatives approved spending $261,668 this year on the multistate review, which will include a public comment period and at least one public hearing within the next six months.

The Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers has established a website to provide information on the application and the schedule for public review of the request. The website address is www.waukeshadiversion.org.

State and provincial officials will tour Waukesha on Feb. 17 and hold a second briefing on Waukesha's request at Carroll University in a meeting open to the public.

A public information meeting and hearing are scheduled Feb. 18 on the Carroll campus. Meeting times will be announced at a later date.

The Michigan Office of the Great Lakes announced Thursday that it would hold a Feb. 9 public hearing on the request in Lansing.

During the webinar, representatives of several Great Lakes environmental groups asked the conference to spend more money on the multistate review so that it could hold at least one public hearing in each of the eight states and in the two provinces.

The conference also should provide sufficient funding to conduct a technical review of the merits of the city's request independent of the Wisconsin DNR's analysis, said Lyman Welch, legal director for the Alliance for the Great Lakes in Chicago.

Waukesha is the first community in the U.S. located entirely outside the Great Lakes basin to ask for a diversion of lake water under a 2008 federal law known as the Great Lakes protection compact.

The compact prohibits diversions of water outside the basin but provided one exception: a community outside the basin can ask for Great Lakes water only if it is located in a county straddling the basin divide.

Waukesha County straddles the subcontinental divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins.

Even so, the compact requires unanimous approval of the governors of each of the eight U.S. states to grant an exception to the law's prohibition of diversions outside the basin. Representatives of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec will participate in the multistate review of Waukesha's request, but only the governors of the eight U.S. states will vote on the application.

One state could block the city from building a proposed $207 million network of pipes and pumps to divert lake water to Waukesha and return treated wastewater to the lake.

The starting point for the multistate review was the Wisconsin DNR's finding that the city's current plans meets all compact requirements for such an exception.

All of Waukesha's water supply alternatives outside the Great Lakes basin "are likely to have greater adverse environmental impacts than the proposed diversion" and the city "is without a reasonable water supply alternative" other than the lake, the agency concluded after more than 5 1/2 years of scrutiny and revisions.

Waukesha could not avoid the need for a lake water diversion through water conservation efforts, currently projected to save 1 million gallons of water a day by midcentury, the DNR concluded.

In a prelude to the public opposition the application will meet across the region, Welch and other speakers representing environmental organizations in the webinar disputed the DNR's findings that the application complied with all compact requirements.

Waukesha is asking the Great Lakes states to approve a plan for diverting up to an average of 10.1 million gallons of lake water a day by midcentury. Oak Creek has agreed to sell water to Waukesha.

The same amount would be returned to the lake as treated wastewater, according to Waukesha Water Utility General Manager Dan Duchniak. Waukesha has proposed discharging the water to the Root River, a lake tributary, in Franklin.

The volume of water pumped to the city likely would start out at an average of 7 million gallons a day or less and gradually build to the maximum average of 10.1 million gallons a day that would be allowed under the proposal.

In 2014, the city pumped an average of 6.6 million gallons of water a day from wells.

The Wisconsin DNR intends to analyze the city's use of water and adjust diversion volumes every 20 years as a condition of approval, Shaili Pfieffer, a DNR water use specialist, said Thursday.

A lake water supply would replace 10 wells, including seven deep wells drawing radium-contaminated water from a depleted sandstone aquifer. Those deep wells provided 83% of the water distributed throughout the city in 2014.

Waukesha is under a court-ordered deadline of June 2018 to provide radium-safe water to its residents and businesses and the city's request for lake water would "solve a public health problem," Duchniak said Thursday.