Great Lakes-St. Lawrence News for Legislators |
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2021 Promises to be a Busy Year for the GLLC |
Two months into 2021, the year is shaping up to be a busy and productive one for the GLLC. The new Executive Committee convened its first meeting on Jan. 22, led by GLLC Chair Rep. Robyn Gabel (Illinois). The committee approved a new GLLC logo and settled on a timeline for web meetings, the annual meeting, and other events in 2021. Web meetings are shifting from a quarterly schedule to bimonthly. The 2021 Annual Meeting is planned for Sept. 24-25 in Quebec City, and the Executive Committee is monitoring the situation with COVID closely to determine whether the meeting will be able to take place in person as planned.
The first GLLC web meeting of 2021 took place on Feb. 19, featuring Chad Lord of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition speaking about recent developments in Great Lakes-related policy and appropriations as well as previewing what might be in store under the Biden Administration and a new Congress. If you missed the web meeting, the recording and a recap of the meeting are available on the GLLC website.
Earlier this month, the Executive Committee voted in favor of signing the GLLC on to " Shared Priorities for Building a Better Great Lakes Basin: Equitable Restoration, Revitalization, Resilience," a joint statement on federal priorities for Great Lakes protection and restoration. This year marks the third time the GLLC has joined other Great Lakes organizations — the Great Lakes Commission, Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition and others — in signing on to the joint priorities. The statement is being released today in time for next week's Great Lakes Day celebrations.
The policy priorities line up with the GLLC's own policy agenda, urging congressional support for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, investing in water infrastructure projects with an emphasis on underserved communities, addressing the problem of harmful algal blooms, and funding and expediting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' work on a new barrier at Brandon Road Lock and Dam to keep Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes (see the article below on Aquatic Invasive Species for more information on Brandon Road). GLLC members are encouraged to amplify these priorities through social media, ideally mentioning @GLLCaucus or retweeting the caucus's tweet sharing the statement.
For GLLC members interested in checking out the Great Lakes Day events, the Embassy of Canada and the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition will co-host a reception on Tuesday (March 2) from 3:30-4:30 p.m. Central/4:30-5:30 p.m. Eastern. The keynote speakers will be The Honorable John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and The Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada's Minister for Environment & Climate Change. Register for the complimentary event here. The Great Lakes Commission also is hosting a complimentary reception at 8 a.m. Central/9 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, March 3. Learn more about the event and register here. |
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A core activity for the GLLC is the Patricia Birkholz Institute for Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Policy. Launched in 2019, the institute brings together a small group of active GLLC members to study an issue on the caucus's policy agenda and then lead the organization's work on this issue as a new GLLC task force. Outcomes of the work are a position statement, action plan, and model policies for adoption in the 10 Great Lakes and St. Lawrence jurisdictions.
The GLLC's Task Force on Nutrient Management is the product of the 2019 institute. This year, the GLLC will host the second institute, this time focusing on helping communities become more climate resilient. To plan this year's institute, the Birkholz Institute Steering Committee convened its first meeting on Feb. 12. The members settled on late October/November for the dates of an in-person workshop that will be the main component of the Birkholz Institute Program in 2021, following two web meetings to provide selected Birkholz Fellows with background information. As was the case in 2019, the institute will take place in Michigan. Members of the Birkholz Institute Steering Committee elected Illinois Sen. Laura Fine and Minnesota Sen. David Senjem to serve as co-chairs of the committee. Other members of the steering committee are Rep. Tim Butler (Illinois), Sen. André Jacque (Wisconsin), Sen. Ann Rest (Minnesota), Rep. Michael Sheehy (Ohio), Sen. Curtis VanderWall and Rep. Joe Tate (Michigan), Eric Brown (Great Lakes Commission) and Matthew Doss (Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Cities Initiative).
GLLC members will receive information this spring on how to apply to take part in this excellent educational and leadership opportunity as Birkholz Fellows. Any members who are interested in planning the institute should email gllc@csg.org to express interest in joining the steering committee. |
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Your Invitation to Join the GLLC
Legislators from the Great Lakes states and provinces are invited to join the leading binational organization of state and provincial legislators promoting the restoration, protection, economy and sustainable use of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.
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A Note from GLLC Director Lisa Janairo
After a 29-year career at The Council of State Governments, including nine years directing the GLLC, I'll be retiring on Feb. 26. The process of hiring my successor will begin in March. During the transition period, CSG Midwest's Regional Director Mike McCabe will be stepping in to staff the caucus.
It has been an honor and an absolute pleasure to work with the GLLC leaders, committee and task force members, and so many other members who are passionate about restoring and protecting the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. You are the only Great Lakes stakeholders that have the authority to pass laws and appropriate funding at the state and provincial level. You deserve a seat at the regional policymaking table and, after years of demonstrating the value legislators add to the conversation, the GLLC has claimed that seat.
There are countless organizations doing excellent, incredibly important work to advance our shared priorities for the Great Lakes — from major region-wide organizations like the Great Lakes Commission to grassroots community organizations. All the efforts of these many Great Lakes groups can only be improved by having knowledgeable, engaged legislators tuning into their work and, when feasible, supporting that research and on-the-ground (or in-the-water) work with policies and funding.
Since the GLLC Executive Committee took the organization through a strategic planning process in 2018, the organization has been on an upward trajectory. I leave my work with the GLLC confident that this upward trend will continue. The caucus is as strong as its members are active, so I encourage all members — and soon-to-be members — to get involved and work with your colleagues on coordinated regional action to ensure that the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River remain a plentiful source of clean, safe, affordable drinking water for the region's residents, businesses and industries, both now and in the future.
I wish you all the best of luck. I look forward to seeing where you will take the GLLC in the years ahead.
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Developments Related to GLLC Policy Agenda |
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December published its proposed changes to the federal Lead & Copper Rule; in January the Natural Resources Defense Council sued in federal court to block the new rule. (A separate lawsuit was also filed in January by Earthjustice; that suit was joined by the NAACP, United Parents Against Lead, Newburgh Clean Water Project and Sierra Club.)
According to The Hill, the EPA’s new rule – if it stands – will require cities to replace 3 percent of lead service lines each year rather than the previous 7 percent if lead is found above 15 parts per billion in 90 percent of tested taps; and will also be required to make those replacements for two years rather than just one. Replacements are not required until a city detects high lead levels in 90 percent of tested taps.
The rule also requires cities to do full lead service line replacements, avoiding the temporary spike in lead levels that can result from cutting into a lead line and replacing only the city-owned side of the line. As a result of the rule, critics say, lead-tainted pipes will remain underground for another 30 years, leaving children particularly vulnerable to brain and nervous system damage, slowed growth and development, and learning and behavioral problems.
Michigan’s Lead & Copper Rule was modified following the drinking water crisis in the town of Flint. The state also implemented a 20-year lead service line replacement program, requiring utilities to replace them at a rate of 5 percent per year, at their own expense, starting this year. Michigan’s 2021 budget allocates $102 million toward replacing lead service lines in disadvantaged communities as part of the $500 million “MI Clean Water.”
More Flint fallout
Michigan’s former Gov. Rick Snyder and eight other officials were indicted on 42 criminal counts over the lead crisis in Flint that began in April 2014 when a state-appointed emergency manager ordered the city’s water supply be switched from Lake Huron (via Detroit’s municipal water system) to the Flint River. A state judge was appointed to act as a one-person grand jury to investigate crimes related to the crisis.
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In early 2021, payments began going out to Ohio farmers participating in that state’s most ambitious effort to date to protect the state’s waterways from nutrient pollution.
“We know the problem took years to create, and we are cognizant that it will take years to fix,” says Joy Mulinex, director of the Lake Erie Commission, which serves as a forum for collaborations between the state’s departments of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
H2Ohio was first introduced in 2019 by Gov. Mike DeWine and received an initial legislative appropriation of $172 million. In his proposed budget for the coming biennium, DeWine calls for spending $242 million on the program.
Part of that money goes to a range of incentive payments for farmers — anywhere from $2 per acre for developing a voluntary nutrient management plan, to $60 per acre for using manure applications that meet state standards.
These and other science-based, cost-efficient management practices (see table) were identified prior to the start of H2Ohio; the key to the program’s success is now getting enough acres enrolled in the voluntary program.
The à la carte program allows farmers to pick management practices that best fit their land for up to three years of funding. Last year, 1,815 farmers enrolled 1,092,852 acres. That amount of acreage is approximately 44 percent of cropland in the program’s target area: 14 counties in the western Lake Erie basin’s Maumee River watershed.
“I feel good about what we are doing,” Mulinex says. “We always want more to happen, faster, but a lot of credit goes to the Department of Agriculture in identifying and incentivizing the best management practices, but also to the producers who really stepped up to enroll their land.
“Commodity groups also get credit for encouraging their members to participate.”
Other advances over the past year include funding the creation, restoration or enhancement of 5,500 acres of wetlands, as well as agreements with individual farmers to install 681 structures that improve drainage water management.
And for producers in the 27 counties in the Lake Erie watershed, the Department of Natural Resources is offering a one-time, $2,000 per acre payment to enroll land in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Lake Erie Conservation Reserve Program.
To ensure these new investments are working, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency will conduct nutrient studies on 72 percent of Ohio’s watersheds every two years, using data from 2016 and 2018 as the baseline.
The recently enacted HB 7 is another tool for monitoring and managing the H2Ohio plan, says John Patterson, who sponsored that legislation last year as a member of the Ohio House. That measure became law in early January; it directs the Department of Agriculture to categorize watersheds and appoint planning and management coordinators in each of Ohio’s seven watershed regions. These coordinators will identify sources and areas of water quality impairment, including the impacts of phosphorus and nitrogen nutrient loading.
Also under HB 7, the Department of Agriculture can establish a pilot program in a single watershed that assists farmers, agricultural retailers, and soil and water conservation districts in reducing phosphorus.
Task Force on Nutrient Management planning educational sessions for GLLC members
The GLLC's Task Force on Nutrient Management will sponsor three GLLC web meetings this spring to showcase H2Ohio and other model programs that prevent polluted runoff from entering the region's waterbodies. The task force will be developing the program for the three-part series in March, with the first web meeting scheduled for April 9 at 9 a.m. Central/10 a.m. Eastern. Beginning March 1, Carolyn Orr will staff the task force.
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The past year ended with two policy developments likely to shape future regional efforts to protect the Great Lakes from one of its greatest threats — the introduction and spread of aquatic invasive species.
As part of a spending bill approved in December, the U.S. Congress authorized an $858 million project to add a new electric barrier and other fish-control technologies at Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet, Ill. The goal: keep Asian carp and other invasive species from reaching the Great Lakes via the Chicago Area Waterway System.
This past fall, too, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released draft standards for how the ballast water on oceangoing vessels must be treated.
Progress on Brandon Road
The new barrier and controls at Brandon Road are a project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Such projects typically require a non-federal sponsor that pays for 35 percent of the costs, but Great Lakes advocates and congressional supporters were able to boost the federal share of Brandon Road’s costs to 80 percent.
That still leaves a considerable amount of money needed for a project with a current price tag of close to $1 billion.
Illinois has signed an agreement with the Army Corps to be the project’s non-federal sponsor for the pre-construction engineering and design phase. And it will be receiving some financial assistance from a Great Lakes neighbor.
Michigan has committed $8 million for this phase of the project. Illinois will contribute the remaining $2.5 million that is needed. The two states entered into an intergovernmental agreement in late December. More costs will come, and have to be covered, for the actual construction phase.
New rules on ballast water
Concerns about Asian carp are behind the push for the Brandon Road project. These species of fish were initially brought to the United States to control algae blooms and vegetation in aquaculture facilities in the South.
They escaped and have spread throughout the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, which are connected to the Great Lakes via the Chicago Area Waterway System, where Brandon Road Lock and Dam is located. But most invasive species, including sea lamprey and zebra mussels, came to the Great Lakes via the discharge of ballast water from oceangoing vessels.
“[It] accounts for anywhere from 55 to 70 percent of the reported introductions since 1959,” Sarah LeSage, aquatic invasive species program coordinator for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said in December during a presentation to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Legislative Caucus.
Preventing these introductions is the goal of the EPA’s proposed new rules, which include discharge-specific standards for 20 different types of vessel equipment and treatment systems. They are the result of the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act of 2018.
Great Lakes advocates largely supported this law because it ensures that the EPA can regulate ballast water discharges as a pollutant under the Clean Water Act, and thus establish science-based treatment standards. But these gains in federal protection will come with a loss of policy authority for states, which will be largely barred from setting more-stringent standards of their own. Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin currently have state-level permitting programs and/or requirements for ballast water management.
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On Jan. 19, its final full day, the Trump Administration announced a U.S. EPA “suite of actions” to address PFAS contamination, including plans to regulate PFOS and PFOA chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
PFOS and PFOA had been added to the EPA’s Contaminant Candidate List in February 2020 – a move requiring the agency to propose a maximum contaminant level and national primary drinking water regulation for them by February 2022. They will be the first additions to the list since 1996.
On Jan. 14, the EPA issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which is now under review by the Biden Administration. (A hint of direction, perhaps, came during a Feb. 4 Senate confirmation hearing for EPA Administrator-designee Michael Regan; the National Law Review quoted him as saying that PFAS regulation is a “top priority.”)
The Natural Resources Defense Council is calling for the EPA to follow Minnesota’s policy of considering chemicals’ impacts on children when setting its new standards. Before setting new drinking water standards, the Minnesota Department of Health compares calculations for adults who have been exposed to a chemical over a long period of time – and for children who drink more water per unit of body mass and thus might be exposed to higher levels.
“Since making the change, Minnesota has derived water guidance for more than 60 chemicals and found that looking at shorter durations of exposure resulted in more stringent standards for more than half of them,” according to a Jan. 26 story on E&E News's Greenwire website.
Congressional PFAS Task Force returns
Also, the Congressional PFAS Task Force was re-established in the new 117th Congress by Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee and Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. Questions about the Task Force can be emailed to Jordan Dickinson.
Wisconsin PFAS rule blocked by legislators
In December, Wisconsin Republican lawmakers blocked the state Department of Natural Resources from enforcing some new PFAS regulations.
The Wisconsin State Journal reported that the Legislature's GOP-controlled rules committee voted 6-4 along party lines to strip key language from a newly adopted temporary rule limiting the use of firefighting foam containing the “forever chemicals.”
Democrats accused the committee of “neutering” the state's first law aimed at curbing PFAS contamination. But the committee's Republican leaders agreed with industry groups that argued the DNR had overstepped its authority.
The temporary rule, which took effect Dec. 4, outlined steps that testing facilities must take to contain and treat fluorinated foam and effectively prohibits them from discharging water with detectable amounts of PFAS.
Industry groups opposed the rule, which was drafted to comply with a GOP-sponsored law passed last year that restricts the use of PFAS foams to emergency situations and testing facilities with “appropriate containment, treatment, and disposal measures.” The law left it to the DNR to define those treatment and disposal measures.
The action came just days after the GLLC wrapped up a series of PFAS roundtable discussions for legislators. The sessions were a collaboration between the caucus and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues (EPI Center). During the sessions, Wisconsin's new rules — then intact — were highlighted as effective new measures by states to combat the growing problem of PFAS contamination of drinking water.
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State and local revolving loan funds for climate resilience infrastructure projects will soon be able to tap a new financial resource under the federal Safeguarding Tomorrow through Ongoing Risk Mitigation (STORM) Act, S.3418 of 2020.
The law authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to grant $200 million to states or tribal governments that received a major disaster declaration during the five years preceding the STORM Act’s enactment.
The grants will help create revolving, low-interest (not more than 1 percent) loan funds for infrastructure programs – but the law doesn’t release that money until federal fiscal year 2022 and does so over two years. Loans will have to be repaid over 20 or 30 years. No more than $5 million can be loaned to an individual project.
GLSLI to survey coastal management needs
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Cities Initiative is launching a survey of its members’ needs for coastal management and resilience to erosion from high lake levels, flooding and severe storm events, among other impacts.
Survey results should be in hand and available later this spring and will help guide future activities to strengthen the ability of local governments to safeguard social, economic and environmental resources in coastal areas, the group said.
If you have questions or would like to receive the survey results, please email Jon Altenberg, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative.
Climate resilience is Birkholz Institute's 2021 focus
As noted earlier in this newsletter, the GLLC's 2021 Patricia Birkholz Institute for Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Policy, which will take place this fall, will focus on helping coastal communities become more climate resilient. The Great Lakes Cities Initiative and Great Lakes Commission are assisting the GLLC in planning this year's institute. During the summer, GLLC members will receive information about applying to become a Birkholz Institute Fellow.
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The GLLC monitors state and provincial legislation on issues related to water quality in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River region. The caucus's "State and Provincial Legislative Tracker" compiles these bills and their status. The tracker is available on the GLLC website. GLLC members and other legislators are encouraged to send their bills for posting to gllc@csg.org.
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Mark your calendars for these GLLC events! Unless otherwise noted, all events are open to anyone who wishes to attend. Registration is required for all events.
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April 9
9 a.m. Central/10 a.m. Eastern
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GLLC Web Meeting: Part 1 of a 3-Part Series Sponsored by the Task Force on Nutrient Management |
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GLLC Web Meeting: Focus on Water Consumption |
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GLLC Web Meeting: Focus on Coastal Communities |
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GLLC 2021 Annual Meeting
Québec City, Québec
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GLLC Web Meeting: Focus on Aquatic Invasive Species |
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GLLC Web Meeting: 2022 Preview |
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The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Legislative Caucus (GLLC) is a binational, nonpartisan organization that exists solely for the purpose of engaging state and provincial legislators in the policymaking process related to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. Secretariat services are provided by The Council of State Governments Midwestern Office. Financial support is provided in part by The Joyce Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. The Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation provides support for the GLLC's work on nutrient pollution.
For more information about the caucus, visit the GLLC website. CSG Midwest's Tim Anderson, Jon Davis, Lisa Janairo, and Carolyn Orr contributed to this newsletter, with assistance from Jenny Chidlow.
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