CHICAGO — Helping cities combat the threat of algae-feeding phosphorus in the Great Lakes has jumped ahead as a national environmental priority because of Toledo’s brush with algal toxins, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told a group of international mayors in Chicago on Wednesday.
Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s cabinet secretary for the environment, also said her agency was redirecting $12 million to “start enhancing our ability to conserve those upstream lands that are most sensitive, to continue to restore wetlands that filter out these phosphates and keep the water quality downstream clean.”
She made comments about the initiative, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Action Plan II, after Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins regaled the Mayor’s Summit on Drinking Water Protection conference with his frustrations from the weekend of Aug. 2-4.
He called the Toledo water crisis his “nightmare among all nightmares” in the meeting of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative called by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“This was the canary in the coal mine,” Mr. Collins said during his 15-minute speech. He said there was no plan for waking Toledo up to a do-not-drink-the-water advisory, no standard that gave him, as mayor, direction.
“We had not one shred of paper to guide us through an incident. Nothing,” Mr. Collins said.
A consensus among the speakers was that phosphorus flowing off farms — so-called nonpoint-source pollution — is the next big threat to water quality to be dealt with. Factory and municipal point-source pollution were addressed starting in 1972 with the Clean Water Act.
“What happened in Toledo is, while there have been other instances, the first time the reliability, the sustainability of our safe drinking water was threatened from an environmental moment. That moment changes this discussion,” Mayor Emanuel said.
Dave Ullrich, executive director of the consortium of 114 U.S. and Canadian cities, said the mayors are asking the EPA and Canada to agree on a single standard for water quality and testing procedures to detect microcystin, the toxin caused by the algae bloom over Toledo’s water intake.
Asked if farmers need to be subject to more regulation, Mr. Ullrich said, “everybody has to be required to do their part, whether by regulation, or law, whatever.
“We’ve tried voluntary programs for 40 years and we aren’t where we need to be,” Mr. Ullrich said, while cities “have been under the gun since 1972 to reduce phosphorus.”
A University of Michigan professor argued that farmers already have been able to get their fertilizer use to 90 percent efficiency, raising a doubt whether any more so-called “best management practices” would significantly cut the large volume of phosphorus choking Lake Erie’s western end during the late summer.
Professor Don Scavia said America needs to reduce the amount of row crops farmers plant by ending the use of corn in ethanol and moving away from meat and sweets in our diet that drive demand for corn.
Ms. McCarthy said she agreed with much of what he said but was not there to debate long-term policy. She said she wanted the mayors to know that the EPA is committed to helping them with infrastructure improvements, developing the science of water quality, and figuring out “how we work collaboratively with agriculture and others to address the problem upstream.”
Mayor Collins told his fellow mayors that he was confronted with technical terminology he had never heard before and was bombarded with conflicting scientific information.
“I said if I don’t have an answer in 45 minutes I’m going to start firing people,” Mr. Collins said he told his technical staff at one point.
He also attributed the impetus for the public advisory that was issued about 1:30 a.m. Aug. 2 to not drink the water to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. He said they called it a recommendation, but it sounded to him like a directive.
“Going back to my 28 years as a police officer, when that red and blue light’s behind you and that siren is sounding, is that a recommendation to pull over,” he said, to laughs. “I’d like to hear that defense in a court of law.”
Mr. Collins asked for President Obama to issue an executive order for the western basin of Lake Erie like one he issued in 2009 that focused on Chesapeake Bay.
And he said the money put up by the federal government so far to deal with drinking water vulnerabilities was “a pittance.”
“We need the full force of the federal government to come here and deal with this issue,” Mr. Collins said.
Ms. McCarthy agreed that the Toledo event of Aug. 2-4 has injected new urgency in the federal government’s focus on drinking water. She said the agency realizes that it needs more reliable and faster procedures for testing microcystis.
“What the Toledo incident did was to tell us we need to put these efforts on steroids,” she said.
At least 25 other representatives of cities on the Great Lakes attended the daylong meeting in a room overlooking Chicago’s Lake Michigan waterfront.
Afterward, Mayor Emanuel hosted a news conference on the deck of the Shedd Auditorium, at which questions came from the Chicago media on subjects other than water, all of which Mr. Emanuel had a ready answer for.
He said Chicago had paved a record 355 miles this year, a number that Mr. Collins, who is arguing with Toledo City Council over a list of about five miles of streets that need paving, found “impressive.”
Mr. Collins said the trip to Chicago, with his wife, Sandra Drabik, was his first time, and said he found it cleaner and more friendly than he expected.
The drinking water summit drew applause from environmental and wildlife conservation groups that said in a joint statement that “cities are taking significant steps to reduce nutrients from sources such as sewage treatment plants and combined sewer overflows. But, cities cannot address this problem alone and we must recognize that much of the excess phosphorus flowing into the lakes is coming from agricultural sources.”
Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.
First Published September 25, 2014, 4:18 a.m.
