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Great Lakes Cleanup Rises to $20 Billion; Group's Blueprint May Not Bring Action

Posted on: Friday, 8 July 2005, 15:00 CDT

Just over a year after President Bush ordered the federal government to take a fresh look at cleaning up the ailing Great Lakes, on Thursday a wide-ranging group of federal, state, tribal and local officials as well as citizens from the eight Great Lakes states came up with a rough cost for the job a whopping $18 billion to $20 billion.

The group, convened by the Environmental Protection Agency, says that is the amount of new money needed in the next 15 years or so to plug the sewage spills that plague the lakes, scoop up the widespread pockets of toxic sediments and slam shut the door to invasive species, among other things.

The price dwarfs the approximately $8 billion now being spent on the high-profile restoration of the Florida Everglades, but EPA officials did not want to dwell on that Thursday. In fact, at a news teleconference called in Duluth, Minn., to tout the new plan, EPA staff said they didn't know what the cost range of the cleanup would be, even thought it was there, in black and white, in the draft plan they had just presented to the public.

"This is about far more than just developing a price tag," insisted Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Water. It is about accelerating coordination and efficiencies of existing cleanup programs, he said.

But some of the conservationists who helped craft the document during the last seven months said the issue is almost entirely about money.

"If it's not funded," said Andy Buchsbaum of the National Wildlife Federation, "it's just a plan."

That plan is the result of presidential order in May 2004 to establish the "Great Lakes Interagency Task Force" to develop a streamlined cleanup program for the lakes. That came after Congress released a report showing that $1.7 billion had been spent on dozens of state and federal restoration programs between 1992 and 2001, but there was little coordination among those efforts. The U.S. waters of the five Great Lakes are jointly managed by Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. The federal government also plays a role.

"We have a lot of musicians," former EPA administrator Michael Leavitt said on the day the task force was created. "What we need is harmony."

Leavitt and Bush were criticized at the time by some who perceived the creation of the task force as a campaign ploy to grab headlines and conservationists' hearts without committing any new money toward Great Lakes protection. So when numbers were finally put on paper Thursday, Great Lakes conservationist groups harmoniously pounced, calling their own news conference before the EPA and other officials formally released the draft.

"We now have a blueprint for how to move forward with restoring and protecting the health of the Great Lakes," Buchsbaum said.

Highlights in the document released Thursday include:

-- $13.7 billion from the federal, state and local governments to fund wastewater treatment improvements.

-- About $2 billion to clean up the lakes' most toxic hotspots by the year 2020.

-- An increase of between $177 million and $289 million annually for the next five years for Great Lakes habitat and species protection.

-- Federal legislation that would better protect the lakes from an onslaught of freighter-borne invasive species.

Conservationists said pumping billions of dollars into the world's largest freshwater system is not money down the drain.

"This is not an environmental project," said Tom Kiernan, president of the National Parks Conservation Association. "This is restoring the ecosystem upon which our economy, our quality of life, our recreation, our health depends."

This is also a project that faces an uphill battle. Congress in recent years has demonstrated a stinginess toward Great Lakes restoration efforts. Two separate pieces of legislation, one requesting $4 billion for the lakes over five years and another seeking $6 billion over a decade, have been stalled in Congress for more than a year.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources secretary Scott Hassett said Thursday that this was not the time to talk about costs.

"The real important thing here is, if those dollars are going to be generated, the best way to do it is to have a plan that all eight states essentially sign on to," Hassett said during the EPA-hosted news conference. "These eight states have to come up with a unified plan."

The plan will now go out for a 60-day public comment period and could be formally adopted in December before it is submitted to Congress and other government bodies in the region for funding.

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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