Plan To Restore Great
Lakes Appears Sunk
November 21, 2005 — By Hugh McDiarmid Jr., Detroit Free Press
Federal officials say they won't pay
for the $20-billion plan President George W. Bush sought last year to
improve the health of the Great Lakes by restoring coastal wetlands and
keeping out sewage and invaders like zebra mussels.
A bipartisan coalition of elected leaders says it was stunned when an
Environmental Protection Agency report recommended that Bush focus on
"improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing programs"
instead of launching expensive new efforts.
Grosse Ile resident Bob Burns, who lives along the Detroit River and has
fished and boated his entire life, said the news was discouraging.
"I thought it was a good idea," Burns said Wednesday. "We need more
funding to deal with invasive species, erosion, wetlands and all the
critical issues."
Last year, in a ballyhooed announcement, Bush called the lakes a
"national treasure" and ordered a task force to spell out a plan to
restore them.
More than 1,000 leaders and experts subsequently recommended in July
that up to $20 billion in federal funding go to the lakes over 5 years
to address crucial issues such as sewage overflows, invader species and
wetlands destruction.
But the restoration shouldn't get 1 cent until an analysis of existing
programs is undertaken, the EPA's administrator, Stephen Johnson, said
in a report to Bush last month.
Bush's initiative gave Great Lakes leaders and advocates hope for a
comprehensive effort along the lines of the $8.3-billion Florida
Everglades rescue, approved in 2000. The federal government is paying
for half of that plan.
The July proposal cited the importance of the Great Lakes to the Midwest
economy and lifestyle. The lakes provide drinking water for 35 million
people; are the linchpin of a multibillion-dollar tourism economy; serve
as highways for a robust international shipping trade, and are the
bedrock of outdoors pursuits like fishing, hunting, bird-watching,
diving and boating.
Thomas Skinner, chief of the EPA's Great Lakes region, said the agency's
report that Great Lakes projects need no additional funding shouldn't be
a surprise.
"Everybody knows there are substantial needs ... but no one
realistically expected at the end of 12 months that we would be ready to
put down x-billion dollars toward this," Skinner said in an interview
Wednesday. "This was always intended to be a step-by-step process. The
money comes later."
Some of the money that advocates want already is coming to the Great
Lakes states under myriad other programs, Skinner said.
Still, congressional leaders and governors from both political parties
and environmentalists from across the Midwest say they were blindsided
on Oct. 28 when the recommendation to Bush, signed by the EPA's Johnson,
concluded the "strategy should focus on what can be accomplished within
current budget projections."
In a Nov. 4 letter to Bush, 41 members of Congress wrote in part: "We
are disappointed. ... We were led to believe that the administration
would consider some new budget initiatives."
Great Lakes leaders wrote another letter to Bush, saying the
zero-funding recommendation goes against "input from our nation's
leading experts on the Great Lakes."
That letter was written by Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican, Wisconsin
Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, also a
Democrat.
Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has not formally responded to the
recommendation, but said the letter from the other three, who are part
of a regional council, speaks for her also.
Skinner said it is "unfair to characterize it as the federal government
doing an about-face."
He said the expensive plan did not factor in the $2 billion annually the
federal government expects to spend on a variety of Great Lakes
water-quality activities during the next decade. Nor does it inventory
the 140 federal programs that deal with Great Lakes issues.
Hopes to rescue even a fraction of the funding plan may rest on the Dec.
12 release of a final draft of a proposal by what Bush called a Great
Lakes "regional collaboration of national significance."
It's a 1,500-member coalition of community leaders, scientists,
activists, businesspeople and many others whose July draft proposal
recommended the $16 billion to $20 billion in additional federal
spending.
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
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