Annual Lake Erie status meeting shows progress and pitfalls

(Note: Corrected Jeff Reutter's name)

LAKELINE VILLAGE – Rob Portman, Ohio’s junior senator, brought his annual Lake Erie status roadshow August 10^th to this Lake County Village where 90 minutes worth of discussion showed what good was being accomplished on the watershed’s behalf.

And how how much work still awaits.

Joining Portman for this year’s forum was U.S. Representative David Joyce (R-14).

Portman holds an annual round-table discussion on Lake Erie, bringing together local, state and federal government officials, representatives of Lake Erie-designated special interest groups, and other watershed stakeholders. This year’s confab was scrunched into tiny Lakeline Village’s equally minuscule town hall; the village being at 0.09 square miles with a population of only 225 people the smallest community in Ohio’s smallest county.

The program was intended to serve as much as a listening post for the two elected officials as it did a soapbox for presenting their own thoughts.

“We’ve developed good partnerships, and I believe there are a lot of good ideas out there,” Portman said. “This way we can be more successful.”

Portman than rattled off some of those partnership-associated accomplishments; ones that always have proven best when accomplished in a bipartisan way, the senator said.

Found on Portman’s list of objectives accomplished was the re-authorization of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. This Congressionally approved plan – which also featured support from Ohio’s senior senator Sherrod Brown and other Democratic colleagues – will see funding in the neighborhood of $300 million annually, rising to $475 million in Fiscal Year 2026, Portman acknowledged.

Portman expounded on this commitment by noting as well his authorship of a measure that will seek to address the harmful impact of algal blooms. These explosive outbursts of nutrient-consuming single-cell organisms are brought about each summer by the residue of fertilizers channeled into Lake Erie’s watersheds via run-off.

“We need to focus our attention like a laser” on this subject, not only on Lake Erie but throughout Ohio, Portman said, explaining how the issue has taken front-burner attention regardless of the state’s geographic location.

Yet Jeff Reutter, retired head of the Ohio Sea Grant program and now with The Nature Conservancy’s Ohio unit, pointed out the problem is a long-lasting one. He illustrated this longevity by saying that while the deluge of heavy rains of late seriously cut into the numbers of farm fields being planted, the resulting precipitation run-off allowed for a greater leeching of fertilizer into the Lake Erie basin.

In effect, Reutter said, “we have not seen any meaningful change” in the nutrient loading of the Lake Erie watershed.

“You’ll be bleeding huge amounts of fertilizers from these fields for years,” Reutter said.

Portman and others attending the conference pointed out also the multi-faceted and on-going issue of plastic contamination into Lake Erie. Everything from discarded plastic bags and other products to plastic microbeads are negatively impacting the lake, said the attendees.

On that score, emerging technologies are being developed to help address this subject in water delivery and recycling systems, said several speakers as well.

Even so, cautionary yellow lights flashed during the 90-minute presentation, too.

Kelly Frey – Ottawa County’s sanitary engineer – explained that all corrective and mitigation plans must demonstrate in some measurable way their successes.

“There has to be a uniform approach for the public to understand it all,” Frey said.

Crystal C. Davis, Policy Director for the Alliance for the Great Lake Lakes, could not agree more. Only by engaging the public in a proactive manner can success be achieved, especially since the people are the lake’s chief and most vital constituency, Davis said.

“There must be more people at the table and more importantly, they have to have a greater voice at that table,” Davis said.

If for no other reason, both Portman and Joyce also said, than because all of these initiatives, programs, projects, ideas and proposals cost dollars. Lots and lots of dollars, they admitted.

And considering the federal budget covers more than just environmental issues, neither Great Lakes residents and their elected officials can afford to become complaisant or silent, Joyce and Portman each stated.

“We have to keep going back and fighting for every dollar during each budget just like every other legislator in this country does for their projects,” Joyce said.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net