Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio’s junior senatorU.S. Senate Photographic Studio-
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It may be too cold for a trip to the beach right now, but Lake Erie is important to Ohio all year round.
Before the holidays, we got some very good news when Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed into law, four critical pieces of legislation that will help protect Lake Erie and secure access to clean drinking water for millions of Ohioans.
I’m a co-chair of what’s called the Senate Great Lakes Task Force, which is a bipartisan group of senators who come up with ways to protect the Great Lakes.
Issues affecting our lake are really important to me and they’re really important to Ohio. Three million Ohioans depend on Lake Erie for their drinking water, and hundreds of thousands of Ohioans depend on the lake for their jobs.
The first new law to help our lake is one I authored with my colleague Sen. Sherrod Brown to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from dumping material it’s dredged from the port of Cleveland into Lake Erie unless the state of Ohio says it’s safe. Because it’s less expensive for them, the Corps has repeatedly tried to do this even when Ohio has said that some of the dredge is contaminated and would hurt our environment. There’s a better way: that’s to deposit the dredge in what’s called a “confined disposal facility,” where it can be processed and used for construction fill, landscaping, and even fertilizer.
I am leading an investigation into the Corps’ activities in Cleveland, and in particular what looks like the Corps’ decision to cut its own budget to bolster its argument that it had to dump dredge in our lake.
March 2016: U.S. Army Corps under congressional investigation for Cuyahoga River dredging plan
More than 18,000 jobs depend on the port of Cleveland and the Cuyahoga River being open for business. If too much sediment builds up in the water, it can block ships from moving through the port and upriver and effectively shut it down. I have repeatedly demanded that the Corps do its job, dredge the port, and safely dispose of the material.
The second new law is a bipartisan response to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The basic idea behind it is that what happened in Flint – where kids were getting sick and even suffering brain damage because of lead in their water – should never happen again.
I worked with Michigan Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters and the Republican chairman of the key committee, Sen. Jim Inhofe, on a solution that will invest $170 million in states like Ohio so that they can address this issue of lead in the water supply, upgrade water infrastructure, and fund health programs for people who are sick with lead exposure.
This is good news for many parts of Ohio that have old water systems – some dating back even to the 1800s – because it makes new funding available to communities along the lake to upgrade their drinking and wastewater systems and make the lake cleaner.
The third is a five-year extension of what’s called the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. This program has brought funding to Ohio cities like Mentor and Euclid to fight pollution in the lake that could damage the $6 billion fishing industry in the Great Lakes – and especially in Lake Erie, which has the most fishing of any of the Great Lakes. President Obama proposed slashing this program by $50 million early last year, so I introduced this legislation to keep it fully funded. After my legislation passed with strong bipartisan support, we got it signed it into law.
September: U.S. Senate approves legislation to improve Great Lakes fish, wildlife, water quality
And finally, the fourth new law is called the Great Lakes Fish and Wildlife Restoration Act, which I worked on with Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It requires the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to partner with other federal agencies and with states like Ohio to restore fish and wildlife populations in the Great Lakes.
These four new measures build on previous laws I’ve championed over the past six years, including laws to prevent Asian carp from getting into the lake, prioritize fighting the toxic algal blooms that caused Toledo’s water crisis in the summer of 2014, and ban the production of microbeads – which are little pieces of plastic used in products like soap or toothpaste. Microbeads are so small that they slip through our water filtration systems, often absorbing toxins and getting eaten by fish, which become sick and unsafe to eat. Stopping these beads from polluting our waters is good for fish and it’s good for fishing jobs.
Lake Erie is an Ohio treasure. Building on our success over the past several years, these four new laws will help us keep it clean, beautiful, and safe for future generations to enjoy.
Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican from the Cincinnati area, is Ohio’s junior senator.
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