The city of Toledo today unveiled a new web-based water quality dashboard for the 2016 algae season that it hopes will give people more information about toxins in the city’s drinking water. 

The new dashboard was revealed at a news conference at the Collins Park Water Treatment Plant, where the next phase of multi-million dollar improvements was also announced. The graphic will go online soon, Janet Schroeder, city spokesman, said.

The biggest change in the water quality dashboard is the needle won’t move out of the far left ”clear” zone until microcystin drawn into the city’s intake is at a concentration of 5 parts per billion or more. That’s the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency action level for testing three times a week.

Last year, that threshold was at 0.3 ppb, the lowest amount detectable. Officials said that putting out warnings when raw water was that low last year caused confusion. That 0.3 ppb level is the point at which water may be dangerous for children 5 years old and younger. But the plant can safely remove toxins at much higher concentrations before it even poses a threat of getting into finished tap water.

“If we had used that last year, that needle would not have moved one time,” Ed Moore, Toledo utilities director, said of the new threshold for alerting the public.

Warren Henry, an engineer the city hired to oversee more than $300 million of improvements by 2022, said the city will be taking bids this year on one of the biggest of those improvements, a $79 million plan to add ozone treatment as a finishing process. That will help further reduce toxins, improve taste, reduce odor, and remove more trihalomethanes, potentially dangerous chemical products of chlorine.

Ohio EPA Director Craig Butler, one of eight speakers at the news conference, acknowledged strained relationships with the city in the past but said the cooperation the regulator is getting now “is just night and day” compared to the way things were in June of 2014, two months before the water crisis.

“Maybe as a silver lining, communities are thinking more about their water,” Mr. Butler said. 

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

First Published May 17, 2016, 4:46 p.m.