Some key Great Lakes officials were upbeat about Lake Erie’s future at a major event Wednesday at Maumee Bay State Park.
Chris Winslow, Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director, said at one point during the Great Lakes Commission’s annual meeting that he was going against his father’s advice to “never say never” and predicting that Toledo will never have another algae-driven water crisis like the one in 2014.
That crisis 9 years ago temporarily left nearly 500,000 without safe water for drinking, cooking, or bathing.
“I don't feel like we have another Toledo water crisis in our future,” Mr. Winslow told nearly 100 people in attendance. “We have the knowledge and technology to remove those toxins in the water.
“I do believe we are moving in the right direction,” he added. “Some would argue not fast enough. But we have taken monumental steps.”
Turning the corner
Likewise, Santina Wortman, who leads nonpoint source-reduction efforts for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago, said she’s encouraged.
She said that western Lake Erie algal blooms - though arriving earlier and staying later - haven’t been quite as intense the last few years as some previous years. The top two years for biomass were in 2015 and 2011.
Ms. Wortman said that, based on what she’s seen in other watersheds, she believes Lake Erie has turned a corner and will be much better a decade from now, once more modern farming practices and wetlands projects have had time to work.
“Blooms, as you know, are highly variable,” she told the commission remotely via an Internet hookup. “It’s a positive thing we're not seeing things getting worse. We're holding the line.”
The commission, based in Ann Arbor, is a taxpayer funded government agency comprised of representatives from each of the eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces to better coordinate policy and communication between them. It has no formal authority, but works for and is funded by those jurisdictions.
The upbeat tone about Lake Erie’s future came despite an acknowledgement that Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario clearly won’t achieve their goal for a collective 40 percent reduction in algae-forming phosphorus releases into western Lake Erie and its tributaries by 2025.
Ms. Wortman noted that, even with a recent doubling of Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funding by the federal government, the western Lake Erie region has hit its phased-in series of benchmarks leading up to that goal only once in the past 10 years. That was in 2015, when there was less rainfall than normal.
She cited reductions in phosphorus discharges from the Detroit wastewater treatment plant as one of the region’s biggest achievements.
Less than 10 percent of Lake Erie’s phosphorus comes from sewage treatment plants, though. Ohio EPA scientists have determined in four biennial “mass balance” reports now that about 90 percent comes from farm runoff.
Variables that could affect progress include hidden impacts of so-called “legacy phosphorus” embedded in soil, and impacts from climate change, Ms. Wortman said.
Mr. Winslow suggested there might be too much emphasis put on the goal of achieving a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus loading by 2025.
“I think many people assumed we completely understood the system and that's not the case,” he said, explaining how there have been multiple lessons learned about legacy phosphorus and other issues.
“We've got to give these [best management farming] practices time to do what we're trying to do,” Mr. Winslow said.
He said it “doesn't surprise me we won't hit that goal [40 percent reduction goal] by 2025,” but said he “couldn’t be more optimistic” about the direction the region is headed.
Critical response
One of the few environmental activists in the audience was Lake Erie Waterkeeper founder Sandy Bihn, who said she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
A longtime critic of political efforts to protect Ohio’s growing corporate agriculture industry, Ms. Bihn said she fears Toledo is a lot more susceptible to another water crisis than Mr. Winslow led the commission to believe.
Meanwhile, groups such as the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center and the Board of Lucas County Commissioners — co-plaintiffs in a landmark Lake Erie case settled earlier this year — are contemplating follow-up legal action.
Both were incensed to learn last week that the U.S. EPA has approved Ohio’s plan to protect Lake Erie through more voluntary incentives for agriculture, including Gov. Mike DeWine’s H2Ohio program. The two plaintiffs claim that strategy alone is too weak.
Lake Erie Advocates, another group that has campaigned hard against corporate agriculture, held a news conference on Monday to express its disappointment in that Lake Erie plan, which was written by the Ohio EPA.
The state agency has defended its plan, written to comply with the federal Clean Water Act’s Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, program. It also has said it is pleased the U.S. EPA approved it without modification.
Also at Wednesday’s event, the commission hosted a talk with Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes and, more recently, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.
Mr. Egan, a former Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel environmental writer, said people seem to be losing sight of simple objectives, such as making beaches and the water abutting them clean enough to kids to swim when they get wrapped up in discussions about TMDLs, long-term planning documents, and legacy phosphorus.
“I just don't think we're listening. The watershed is being overburdened. The lake is telling everyone that,” he said, referring to manure from large livestock facilities known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
Mr. Egan noted how Wednesday’s weather was ideal, yet there was virtually nobody using the Maumee Bay State Park’s Lake Erie beach. The beach, one of the largest in northwest Ohio, is visible from the state park’s meeting ballroom.
He said there must be a way to “keep farmers in business and kids at the beach.”
“And it shouldn't be one or the other,” Mr. Egan said. “I don't want to demonize anybody. But I do want people to look at this holistically.”
The Great Lakes Commission’s annual meeting began Tuesday afternoon with a tour of the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center near Maumee Bay State Park. It concludes on Thursday with discussions about fishing, dredging, economic impacts of Great Lakes shipping, and other issues.
First Published October 4, 2023, 8:57 p.m.
