Sen. Portman's Lake Erie round table focuses on positives but shuns wind farm controversary

“The problems with Lake Erie did not start yesterday and they won’t be resolved overnight.” - Leonard Hubert, Ohio Executive Director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency.

OAK HARBOR: An annual “round table-style” presentation by Ohio’s junior U.S. Senator Rob Portman on August 10^th largely focused on the positive that government is doing to protect and enhance Lake Erie’s water quality.

In doing so, Portman and several other round table presenters said, the lake’s commercial, recreational, fisheries, and agricultural components all will benefit – a belief that a rising tide does float all ships. The forum was held at Green Cove Condominiums, just west of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant.

“We are now seeing the government and industry are finally working together,” Portman said in his opening remarks to about 50 nearly all Lake Erie Western Basin stakeholders.

Those remarks came about following the efforts of both entities to look for ways to keep so-called microbeads from entering Lake Erie, which in turn contaminate its waters. Microbeads are plastic objects smaller than than a maximum of one millimeter in diameter, and which are sloughed off from a variety of everyday products and thereby are potentially harmful to any living thing that absorbs or eats them, intentionally or otherwise.

“It’s been an important success story,” Portman said.

So too, says Portman, are the bipartisan efforts to hammer in place a better and larger Farm Bill. Those efforts include versions that have passed in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the US. Senate with a joint reconciliation group designated to fine-tune a measure that will be given to President Trump for his approving pen stroke, Portman said.

“It has more money earmarked for conservation that ever before,” Portman said of at least the Senate’s Farm Bill version. “That is also important because we can better (fiscally) work with the people who have to deal with these water quality issues on a daily basis like county soil and water conservation districts.”

Portman and Ohio Environmental Agency director Craig W. Butler tag-teamed the federal and state government’s successful browbeating and lawsuit threatening actions directed at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That process was undertaken to terminate the Corps’ annual dumping of dredged material removed from riverine shipping channels into Lake Erie’s open waters.

As a result, speakers at the federal and state levels said their respective administrative handlers “now have a good working relationship with the Corps.” That essential work-day ethic cannot be minimized, either, speakers said, given that about 20 million cubic yards of sediments are dredged annually from Ohio’s Lake Erie tributaries where such operations are conducted.

The key now, said also several of the round table speakers, is finding a place where this muck, sand, mud and soil can find a new home and perhaps become a valuable and coveted commodity.

Karl Gebhardt, the Ohio EPA’s deputy director, added that new strategies developed at helping the toxic algal blooms at Grand Lake St. Marys are going to find applications in the Maumee River. The Maumee is the chief culprit of nitrogen-bearing contamination into Lake Erie and for which the various harmful fisheries, human health, and tourism-defeating issues take up front page space every summer.

“The object is to reduce the influx of such nutrients into Lake Erie,” Gebhardt said.

Chiming in as well was Ohio State Representative Steve Arndt, R-Port Clinton, who said that a $36 million segment has been added to the state budget and specifically allocated for designated Lake Erie projects. Included in the funding’s shopping cart is money to help upgrade scientific equipment at the Ohio Sea Grant’s Stone Laboratory at Put-in-Bay, a facility dedicated on Lake Erie research.

Among the account’s other designated funding is $20 million for nutrient reduction work along with $3.5 million to be channeled for county soil and water conservation districts.

“That’s (all) actually a significant amount of money,” Arndt said.

However, not everything was addressed in such glowing words. Left out of the positive equation was any commitment to help resolve the high-profile/deeply dividing subject of placing electricity generating stations and massive wind farms both along the Lake Erie shoreline as well as in the lake itself.

Portman pretty much passed the buck by saying that the question is not a federal one, but, rather, a “local and state issue.”

Likewise, Frank Szollosi, manager of the National Wildlife Federation’s Regional Outreach Campaign, said his group “has not taken a position on it;” the “it” being Lake Erie-based wind-powered electricity-generating units.

In the end, though, said Portman, there have been more positives and gains this past year than negatives and steps back.

“We’re lucky to have such good partners like Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio EPA,” said Portman.

- By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net