Senior U.S. District Judge James G. Carr has stepped down from the landmark Lake Erie TMDL case in preparation for his June 30 retirement.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey J. Helmick.

Fritz Byers, an attorney who brought the case on behalf of the Lucas County commissioners, declined comment.

In an interview with The Blade, Judge Carr said he has begun the process of removing himself from cases with long, complicated issues and pending motions, such as this one. He said he believes that decisions on such matters should be decided by the successive judge of each case for a more seamless transition.

“I think it’s time,” he said. “It’s a fork-in-the-road sort-of-thing.”

Judge Carr said his long career as a jurist has been “an unimaginable opportunity and experience.”

He said he became a magistrate judge on Sept. 29, 1979.

On May 10, 1994, he became a U.S. District Court judge and was elevated to senior judge status on May 31, 2010.

A 1966 graduate of Harvard Law School, Judge Carr has served as a University of Toledo law professor. He also spent six years as a member of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.

A public records search shows about a dozen other cases handled by Judge Carr that have been reassigned or are in the process of being reassigned to other jurists.

Bradley J. Lagusch, the Toledo Bar Association’s chief executive officer, said Judge Carr “definitely stands for professionalism and the congeniality that is known throughout Toledo,” especially among judges and the many attorneys who have come before them.

“He has always been someone who has given back to the legal profession through his guidance,” Mr. Lagusch said.

Judge Carr was the bar association’s president in 2001. He started an annual judicial evaluation survey that allows local attorneys to anonymously provide thoughts about experiences they had coming before local judges over the prior 12-month period, Mr. Lagusch said.

“During his time as president and throughout his legal career, Judge Carr demonstrated a steadfast commitment to upholding the rule of law and maintaining the highest standards of professionalism,” he said. “His leadership and dedication to justice has left a lasting impact on the Toledo legal community. He is going to missed by the bench and the bar.”

The Lake Erie case before Judge Carr is a reboot of an earlier one that ended up in a consent decree.

In both cases, the Lucas County Board of Commissioners and the Environmental Law & Policy Center sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its leadership.

The first lawsuit was over the federal agency’s failure to require its state counterpart, the Ohio EPA, to create a planning document known as a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, that could be used as a tool for reducing algae-forming phosphorus runoff from farms across much of the Maumee River and the western Lake Erie watershed.

The follow-up lawsuit, which has included the city of Toledo as a co-plaintiff, claims the TMDL that Ohio submitted and the federal government approved in 2023 was insufficient.

The document in dispute is one of the nation’s largest TMDL plans, rivaled in geographic size only by one adopted years ago for the Chesapeake Bay.

Prior to those two cases was one in which plaintiffs succeeded in getting Ohio’s portion of western Lake Erie declared as an impaired body of water, as Michigan had done with its much smaller portion of the lake.

That designation, plaintiffs claimed, should have automatically set the wheels in motion for Lake Erie’s first TMDL, which neither the state of Ohio nor the U.S. EPA wanted to do. Plaintiffs cited requirements of the federal Clean Water Act in their argument.

The latest version of the case has become the most complicated because a multigroup coalition of agricultural interests, led by the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, is arguing it has a right to become a defendant, as have a multigroup coalition of industries and municipalities.

Lake Erie Waterkeeper and two national environmental groups, the New York-based Waterkeeper Alliance and the Washington-based Food & Water Watch, subsequently petitioned the court to let them serve as co-plaintiffs.

All are awaiting rulings.

The Ohio EPA, at its request and that of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, was added as a defendant by Judge Carr in December.

First Published February 28, 2025, 6:20 p.m.