US House of Representatives Must Vote Next for Critical Legislation
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Don Carr, Media Director, Alliance for the Great Lakes dcarr@greatlakes.org
WASHINGTON DC (December 5, 2024) Last evening the United States Senate passed in a bipartisan vote the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Act of 2024. The legislation, critical to the continued health of the Great Lakes and the communities and economies they support, now heads to the House of Representatives where supporters hope it will pass before the end of the session.
In 2010, Congress established the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) to allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in collaboration with other federal agencies, states, local governments and tribes, to fund projects to restore and protect the Great Lakes. GLRI projects clean up toxic legacy pollution near major urban areas, reduce agriculture runoff pollution threatening drinking water supplies, reestablishes habitat for plants and animal species and prevents the establishment and spread of harmful invasive species.
“This is exactly the kind of federal legislation that Congress should be passing,” said Don Jodrey Alliance for the Great Lakes Director of Federal Relations. “The GLRI is bi-partisan, uncontroversial, and has a demonstrative positive rate of economic return. For every federal dollar spent it generates three dollars in economic activity.”
“We’ve made progress on cleaning up industrial pollution, but sites with legacy pollution still linger. And the lakes are now facing a host of challenges from our rapidly warming atmosphere including more intense storms that are already overwhelming water infrastructure across the region. For those reasons, and many more, the Alliance is urging swift, bi-partisan passage of the GLRI in the US House of Representatives,” Jodrey added.
Much of the GLRI’s efforts is to remove toxic legacy pollution at the 25 remaining Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOC). These are the region’s most contaminated sites and a legacy of industrial development, prior to the Clean Water Act, when toxic pollution was dumped unabated into our lakes, rivers, and harbors. Six AOC’s have already been delisted thanks to the GLRI, and the actions necessary to delist 10 additional AOCs have also been completed.
Since 2010, the GLRI has built an impressive record of success. It has funded more than 7,563 individual projects totaling $3.7 billion thereby greatly improving the quality of life in the region. Pollution from local industry, particularly PCBs from a paper mill, resulted in the toxic sediments in the Manistique River in the city of Manistique, Michigan. In 2020, GLRI federal agencies and their partners began the process of removing mill debris and remediating over 50,000 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated sediment from the Manistique site. GLRI funding assisted the Invasive Mussel Collaborative and its partners in an experiment to determine if a molluscicide treatment would reduce quagga mussel density on a reef in Good Harbor Bay in Lake Michigan near Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The testing resulted in a 95% reduction in mussel density.
In May 2020, GLRI funding assisted in constructing an aquatic nuisance species barrier at a 5-mile stretch along the Ohio and Erie Canal towpath near Akron, Ohio. The barrier prevents the transfer of ecosystem-destroying invasive carp between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, protecting small businesses that rely on recreation and tourism. In 2021, over 4 million cisco (or lake herring) were stocked in Lake Huron as part of a rehabilitation program begun in 2018 in Saginaw Bay, Michigan. Once abundant throughout the Great Lakes, cisco populations flatlined due to overfishing and invasive species. The GLRI is also funding work to address toxic legacy pollution in a 45 mile stretch of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River that EPA designated as an Area of Concern in 1987. This is the river that famously caught fire in 1969. The river’s overall water quality is improving because of these investments.
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The Alliance for the Great Lakes is a nonpartisan nonprofit working across the region to protect our most precious resource: the fresh, clean, and natural waters of the Great Lakes.