$475M in budget to restore the Lakes

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — A plan hatched more than three years ago to heal the battered Great Lakes would get its first big infusion of federal cash under President Barack Obama’s proposed budget.

The 2010 spending blueprint released Thursday includes a $475 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative led by the Environmental Protection Agency. It would target problems such as invasive species, runoff pollution, degraded wildlife habitat and contaminated bottomlands.

“The Great Lakes are just an outstanding resource, one of the major freshwater resources of the world,” said Mike Shapiro, EPA’s acting administrator for water. “This increase in funding will allow us to make significant progress in protecting and restoring them.”

The budget also requests $3.9 billion nationwide for sewer and drinking water system upgrades. If distributed according to existing formulas, about $1.4 billion would go to the Great Lakes region, where overflows from degraded sewers are a primary ecological hazard. Formulas for the new budget are still in the works, Shapiro said.

It adds up to the biggest financial commitment any president has made to the lakes, said Jeff Skelding, director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.

“President Obama is truly a Great Lakes president,” Skelding said. “It is clear he understands that unless America invests in the Great Lakes, these problems will get worse and the price we pay will be higher.”

During his campaign last year, Obama pledged $5 billion toward implementing a restoration wish list released in December 2005 by the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration, a partnership of government agencies and advocacy groups. The Bush administration had requested the plan, which would cost more than $20 billion, but provided little funding.

Obama’s budget proposal represents the first serious effort to begin paying for it, said Andy Buchs- baum, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s regional office in Ann Arbor.

“In the past we’ve had to do it in bits and pieces,” Buchsbaum said. “We’ve had authorization bills, pledges, concept papers. But this is the first time we’ve really seen the money.”

Not all the money Obama’s budget seeks would be new, Shapiro told The Associated Press in a phone interview. The restoration initiative would continue funding of some existing programs — primarily the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which removes toxic sediments from highly polluted harbor and river bottoms.

But at least $415 million would be first-time funding, he said.

It hasn’t been determined how the money would be allocated. A task force of federal agencies that helped put together the regional collaboration plan will compile an initial priority list over the next six weeks, Shapiro said.

EPA regards the Great Lakes initiative as an opportunity to show the importance of restoring the lakes as one integrated watershed instead of taking a piecemeal approach, he said.

During a Great Lakes Commission meeting this week in Washington, new EPA head Lisa Jackson told officials and activists from the region the administration intended to keep Obama’s financial commitment.

“We’ve got the plan, we’re ready to go,” said Tim Eder, director of the interstate commission, which promotes sustainable development of Great Lakes resources. “We just needed a partnership with the federal government.