In 2017, Toledo and Lucas County launched a study to find and map the sources of pollution fueling Lake Erie’s annual toxic bloom. Now, with this year’s algae season in full gooey green bloom, officials have released the results.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, agricultural runoff in northwest Ohio is largely to blame for the phosphorus running down the Maumee River into the lake.
City and county officials pledged that they would aim to reduce phosphorus pollution by 40 percent in the next six years.
But that promise has two problems: Those local leaders are not the officials with the direct authority to crack down on agricultural runoff. And the state and federal authorities who are in the position to effect change that will reduce pollution have ducked that responsibility for years.
Former Gov. John Kasich, for instance, signed on to similar promises to reduce phosphorus pollution draining into Lake Erie. Mr. Kasich also stubbornly insisted for the better part of his two terms in office that voluntary pollution-reduction measures would be sufficient to meet these goals.
Then, last year, Mr. Kasich admitted that data from his own Ohio Environmental Protection Agency showed the voluntary measures had made no measurable reduction in pollution.
Now Gov. Mike DeWine — along with the Ohio General Assembly and the U.S. EPA — continue to resist the measures that everyone from scientists to people living along Lake Erie know are necessary.
Ohio needs a pollution diet, which starts with embracing the reality that Lake Erie’s polluted condition violates the Clean Water Act. Then, as it did with Chesapeake Bay and other large-scale water pollution cases, the EPA must track and quantify the sources of Lake Erie’s pollution.
Finally, federal authorities must set strict pollution limits, backed by the force of law, and enforce them.
Mr. DeWine’s proposed $900 million for his targeted H2Ohio water clean-up program will be necessary to fund the changes that will meet those pollution limits. But it will not be sufficient. Mr. Kasich spent $3 billion on water-quality improvement measures that amounted to no measurable change, remember.
As Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz has said, we know what is causing the problem. The question is summoning the political will to actually solve it.
First Published August 20, 2019, 4:00 a.m.
