A researcher state officials called upon for years as their point person for multiple Lake Erie issues has told the Ohio EPA its written plan to control algal blooms is doomed to fail unless strengthened.
In five pages of typewritten comments, Jeff Reutter said the agency cannot expect to have an effective planning tool if it focuses solely on a policy that only considers springtime and early summer concentrations of total phosphorus in Maumee River water.
“With that as your plan, this TMDL is doomed to failure, and we should not even waste the money to do it,” Mr. Reutter said in his formal statement to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency about its total maximum daily load plan for addressing algal blooms.
Mr. Reutter, retired Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director, characterized Ohio EPA estimates on two pages in particular as “deceiving and disingenuous.”
“One of the most important annual negative changes to the watershed is the addition of more animals and more manure,” he wrote.
“As long as guidelines allow animal operations to apply several times the amount of manure (phosphorus) needed for crop production, we will continue to create and build legacy fields that bleed [dissolved reactive phosphorus] at concentrations that exceed the [U.S.-Canada] Task Team target,” he wrote.
Mr. Reutter also said the current goal of reducing phosphorus runoff into western Lake Erie by 40 percent over 2008 levels, now seen as unachievable by its 2025 target date, appears to be too low. That’s because of how accurate climate modeling has been, he said.
The Great Lakes region and other parts of the Midwest are second only to New England for rain intensity and frequency since the 1960s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Mr. Reutter said he and other members of a U.S.-Canada task force that came up with that 40 percent goal seven years ago “knew there was absolutely no way a [total phosphorus] target alone would solve the problem.” He also said scientists have since learned that dissolved reactive phosphorus “is even more important than we originally thought.”
“What I expect from this TMDL is a plan that will hit our task team targets,” Mr. Reutter wrote, adding that he “was hoping to see a report that would work harder to identify phosphorus sources from agriculture.”
“You are making no attempt to do that,” he said.
Another well-known researcher who is highly critical of the plan is California’s Peter F. Hess, a Toledo native and University of Toledo distinguished College of Engineering alumnus now working as an environmental policy consultant.
He provided an advance copy of 130 pages of remarks he submitted to the Ohio EPA.
In his package, Mr. Hess said he was dismayed that 73 livestock operations licensed by the Ohio Department of Agriculture as combined animal feeding facilities got so little attention.
“This lack of attention” to the total phosphorus and dissolved reactive phosphorus discharge caused by 73 large livestock feeding facilities “is more than an oversight, it is a structural defect in the TMDL,” Mr. Hess wrote.
He agreed that such large livestock facilities “have the right to apply manure onto lands for crop production.”
But, he added, that right to apply manure “is tempered when the application of manure [is] in excess to what is assimilated in crop production and is discharged by ground tiles.”
“Studies show that when too much manure is applied, the unassimilated excess may be discharged to the waterway of the state of Ohio,” Mr. Hess wrote.
State response
Heidi Griesmer, Ohio EPA spokesman, said the state agency has made changes to improve its Total Maximum Daily Load document since it began writing it about 18 months ago. She said the agency has “continually been engaged with stakeholders through frequent webinars or meetings and held three separate public comment periods.”
“This process has led to a report that is consistent with the best available science,” she said. “Ohio EPA developed an implementation plan that we maintain will manage nutrients and excess water to significantly reduce harmful algal blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie.”
“As we have throughout this process, we will consider comments we receive during our current comment period before finalizing the report,” she also said.
Ms. Griesmer went on to say the agency is aware of concerns raised about dissolved reactive phosphorus being such a key component of algal blooms and agrees it needs to be reduced.
But she said the agency has taken a position that dissolved reactive phosphorus is only a portion of total phosphorus and is therefore not being ignored.
Mr. Reutter said in his remarks, though, that science shows dissolved reactive phosphorus is 100 percent bioavailable to plants and algae, whereas total phosphorus is only 26 percent bioavailable.
The first-of-its-kind planning document is expected to be submitted to the U.S. EPA for approval soon. The draft version has been out for public comment for weeks. The deadline to respond in writing expired Wednesday.
Ty Higgins, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation spokesman, said his group continues to believe that a total maximum daily load plan “is not the most effective way to protect water quality.”
In addition, the group continues to believe Ohio is better served by Gov. Mike DeWine’s H2Ohio program. Among other things, that program pays farmers to use more water-retention strategies, Mr. Higgins said.
Farmers are doing other conservation programs, some funded by the federal government’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, and on their own accord, Mr. Higgins said.
“The beauty of a public comment period is that all individuals have the opportunity to express their comments on the document,” he said. “It is up to the document authors, Ohio EPA in this case, to accept the public comments, evaluate them for validity and make any adjustments to the document as warranted.”
“As that process continues, we remain focused on working on solutions that we know are making a difference,” Mr. Higgins said.
Expert’s experience, key issues
Mr. Reutter represented the state of Ohio at multiple international proceedings. They include one in February, 2016 when the governments of the United States and Canada agreed to set a goal of achieving a 40 percent reduction in both types of algae-forming phosphorus runoff by 2025, with 2008 as the base year.
He likewise was called upon by governors from both parties for his Lake Erie expertise to brief them and members of the Ohio General Assembly on multiple occasions.
He and others from Michigan and Ontario chose 2008 as their base year to achieve a 40 percent reduction because scientists don’t expect they will ever eliminate algal blooms from western Lake Erie.
Their goal was to create a baseline in which there will be mild or near-existent blooms nine out of every 10 years, similar to the low-bloom years of 2004 and 2012 in which the region had little rain pushing nutrients into the water.
The state must write the plan for western Lake Erie because of a lawsuit brought against the U.S. EPA in 2019 by the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, along with the Board of Lucas County Commissioners. The lawsuit contends the U.S. EPA violated the Clean Water Act by not requiring more aggressive action from the state of Ohio years ago.
An agreement in principle has been reached in U.S. District Court before Senior Judge James Carr. But the Ohio EPA, which for years balked at the notion of writing a planning document, began writing one after the case moved in that direction.
Lawyers for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, as well as the Lucas County Commission, have demanded a TMDL that is meaningful enough to reverse the trend of summer algal blooms that have been recurring almost annually since 1995.
Numerous activists and others, including attorney Fritz Byers, who represents Lucas County commissioners, have demanded a focus on dissolved reactive phosphorus, which is much more readily consumed by algae.
“The TMDL needs to be the tool to measure CAFOs and ensure accountability,” Lucas County Commission President Pete Gerken said in a news release issued by the board on Wednesday. “Otherwise, we will lose the next battle.”
Commissioner Tina Skeldon Wozniak agreed, adding that the region “shouldn’t be fooled into settling for half measures and voluntary practices any longer.”
“We are talking about the health of our most valuable resource, and we must have a meaningful TMDL to protect it,” she said.
In his written comments, Mr. Byers said the degradation of western Lake Erie from algal blooms “is a grave threat to the economic and physical health of the region” and also said the state must put more weight on dissolved reactive phosphorus.
“A TMDL that fails to do so cannot succeed in remediating Lake Erie,” Mr. Byers wrote.
Rob Michaels, ELPC senior attorney, called the Ohio EPA’s proposed TMDL “nothing but a permission slip to spend another 10 years doing exactly the same things we have been doing for the past 20 years — spend massive sums of public money to encourage voluntary pollution reduction from agriculture, none of which have put a dent in the problem.”
“The TMDL doesn’t even set a target for the pollutant driving the algae blooms, dissolved reactive phosphorus. Instead, it only sets a target for total phosphorus, which won’t clean up the lake because DRP makes up only 20 percent of total phosphorus and is much harder to reduce,” Mr. Michaels said in a statement issued by the group.
First Published March 11, 2023, 3:00 p.m.
