Great Lakes Compact nears overdue ratification by states

Great Lakes Compact nears overdue ratification by states

The Ohio General Assembly’s long-overdue passage of the Great Lakes Resources Compact last week leaves Pennsylvania as the only one of the eight Great Lake states not to have approved the compact. It passed the Pennsylvania House in January and has since been bounced between the Senate Environmental Resources and Appropriations committees in the Keystone State.

In Ohio, the bill got hung up for months on what was essentially an ideological question regarding water rights for private landowners adjacent to Lake Erie. Lost in the argument was the larger point that if all of the Great Lakes states (and Canadian provinces) don’t get on the same page pretty soon, they could see their collective water rights flowing toward the ever-drier, ever-more-politically powerful Southwest.

The compact has been kicked around for years. The governors of all eight states signed on in 2005 and the first state to ratify the agreement was Minnesota in early 2007.

Provincial arguments about groundwater in Ohio or giving Milwaukee’s suburbs a bigger drink out of Lake Michigan have already caused too much of a delay. Pennsylvania should quickly join Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and New York in approving Great Lakes Compact legislation. The sooner all the states are on board, the sooner the compact can be taken to Congress. Unless enabling legislation gets through Congress before reapportionment based on the 2010 census, passage could be seriously jeopardized.

Big and beautiful

The Great Lakes states border an enormous natural resource, but one that must be protected from abuse by the states themselves and from an attack by parched outsiders.

If the states don’t themselves show a willingness to protect the largest fresh water body of water in the world from pollution and over-tapping, they will find it more difficult to make either political or moral arguments against abuse by others. And if the United States doesn’t choose to protect the lakes, Canada will feel less of an obligation to do so. Canadian provinces bordering the lakes — Ontario and Quebec — have agreed to generally abide by provisions of the compact.

Regardless of the size of the lakes, they are a relatively fragile ecosystem. The Ohio Environmental Council, a Columbus advocacy group, notes that the Great Lakes Basin contains 95 percent of the nation’s fresh surface water and supplies drinking water for 33 million people living within its watershed. But rainfall and snowmelt replenish only about 1 percent of the lakes’ water each year, meaning that they are subject to depletion if water is piped or shipped outside the watershed.

Other areas of the country market themselves on the basis of their sunny climates and towering mountains, but the Great Lakes states have what others don’t — an abundance of cool, clear water.

The lakes are already an important economic asset, providing water, shipping and recreation.

To protect that asset, the states’ legislatures and their congressional delegations must aggressively pursue final approval of the Great Lakes Compact. It’s sound environmental and economic policy for the entire region.