The $1.8 million investment in a massive wetland-restoration project adjacent to Maumee Bay State Park boils down to this: Was Lou Glatzer right?

Maumee Bay State Park’s two beaches — one along Lake Erie and the other along the inland, man-made pond — have been plagued by intermittent bacteria spikes since the park opened in 1975.

The pollution, most common after heavy rain, occasionally makes those beaches unsafe.

In 1996, Mr. Glatzer, a retired University of Toledo biology professor, approached a local bacteria task force with a bit of a gamble: Doing DNA-like research to identify the greatest source of the bacteria with genetic evidence.

DNA research was not as developed then.

Mr. Glatzer and Robert Sinsabaugh, the first director of UT’s Lake Erie Center, received a $142,526 grant from the Ohio Lake Erie Commission for a two-year project based on Mr. Glatzer’s proposal.

Mr. Glatzer’s research ultimately strengthened his theory that human and animal waste were getting into Wolf Creek, a waterway that begins around Northwood. That creek flows into Berger Ditch, which bisects the park and empties into Lake Erie near the beaches.

Mr. Glatzer and UT researchers proposed a “return to nature” project by designing an engineered wetland to capture the bacteria fouled the park’s Lake Erie beach. 

The project remained in its design phase until President Obama’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a multimillion program for restoration projects across the Great Lakes basin. 

The initiative began shortly after Mr. Obama took office in 2009, to fulfill his campaign promise to infuse the Great Lakes region with $5 billion for restoration projects.

Congress has never authorized more than $500 million a year and recent allocations are about half that.

But UT, the city of Oregon, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. EPA, the local engineering firm of Hull and Associates, and others involved with the wetland got what they needed from the program.

Once that happened, the work came together quickly. The Ohio Department of Health’s 2015 sampling program for the park began on Tuesday. But that didn’t stop U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) and others from hailing the project at Wednesday’s dedication ceremony.

“Today, we really celebrate victory and results,” Miss Kaptur said to nearly 60 people on the wetland’s south side.

Daryl Dwyer, a University of Toledo environmental sciences professor who replaced for Mr. Glatzer, said preliminary results show the wetland has stopped more than 80 percent of the bacteria flowing northward in Wolf Creek and Berger Ditch. There are other bacteria sources, though: Most of the inland pond’s bacteria, for example, is attributed to feces from geese and other birds.

But if the wetland works as designed, it should put a huge dent in the bacteria problem. It also was designed to capture phosphorus and other nutrients that help algae grow. Early results show about a 50 percent reduction in the phosphorus content of Wolf Creek and Berger Ditch, Mr. Dwyer said.

“The idea is to use this to demonstrate similar things can be done in other places,” Mr. Dwyer said.

The wetland is designed as a three-tiered filtering system. It works in tandem with a man-made pond off Wolf Creek designed to get bacteria-laden sediment and other particles to settle in it first. Captured phosphorus may someday be reused by area farmers.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.

First Published May 28, 2015, 4:00 a.m.