Another battle has been fought for the protection of the Great Lakes. Last month Lucas County Commissioner Carol Contrada visited Washington, D.C. to attend the Great Lakes Days conference, with a goal of restoring funding that was cut from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI).
“Restoration and expansion of the GLRI is imperative because it is through GLRI that we directly implement the changes and improvements necessary to heal our waters,” said Commissioner Contrada.
Working for the water
This is the eighth year of the conference, which looks to bring federal government officials and local leaders together to discuss how to protect the Great Lakes. Contrada explains, the conference “opened up a great dialogue between the people here [in Lucas County] who are the boots on the ground, doing the work, and federal policy makers.” Those boots on the ground come from organizations that attended the conference with the Commissioner, including members of the National Wildlife Federation, the Great Lakes Commission and the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
The conference helped shine a light on regional conservation efforts. “We were able to share initiatives that the county has been developing and promoting, and we were able to get information about the current
funding and policy positions of different agencies in the federal
government,” Contrada added.
Problematic pollutants
The commissioner presented the Lucas County Sources and Amounts Assessment at the conference, “a comprehensive watershed initiative that will establish sources of phosphorus, establish a baseline, and help measure effectiveness of programs.” Phosphorous is a
nutrient which sustains the algae that caused Toledo’s water crisis two summers ago. The problem,
according to the Commissioner, has lead to “a binational agreement between the federal governments of Canada and the US to target a 40% phosphorous reduction [in the lakes]. We presented to Congress and members of the Obama Administration meaningful, effective measures to achieve a 40% phosphorous reduction in the Western Lake Erie Basin and Lake Erie.”
Despite the success of the conference, there’s still a lot of work to do. Future funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is still murky warned Contrada, adding “we’ll see how the federal budgeting plays out.”
For more information on the conference, visit projects.glc.org/greatlakesday
