Sea of Studies Doesn't Help Restoration of Great Lakes

The effort to attract more dollars and interest to the Great Lakes is a case study in how regional authorities with big-ticket ambitions must compete for national attention. Without federal money and commitment, there are severe constraints on what will be accomplished.

That is why Kirk mentions in an interview that the Great Lakes region, stretching from New York to Minnesota, touches 128 electoral votes. And why a Capitol Hill staffer notes that all eight governors of states bordering the lakes and the mayors of every Great Lakes city with more than 50,000 residents supported the restoration project outlined by Emanuel and Kirk and backed by more than 100 House members.

"Right now, we've got the states, the mayors, the public on board. Now we need to see the federal agencies stand firm," Davis said.

Advocates in the Midwest often cite the Chesapeake Bay and the Everglades as restoration projects that caught Washington's eye and pried open the federal checkbook. They ask, why not the Great Lakes, home to 21 percent of the fresh water on Earth's surface -- and at least 31 toxic sites that require cleanup.

Twenty-eight million Americans depend on the lakes for water, as do thousands of farms and businesses. The water is used for drinking, and waste is pumped back into the deep. A single coal-fired Wisconsin power plant will suck in 2.2 billion gallons of water a day, returning it to Lake Michigan several degrees warmer. Near Chicago, 2.1 billion gallons of the lake's water flows each day into a canal that reversed the Chicago River.

Development next to the lakes has "seriously degraded" water quality, the then-General Accounting Office wrote in a 2003 report that criticized the Bush administration for doing too little. The GAO described the administration report called Great Lakes Strategy 2002 as little more than a catalogue of existing efforts that provided no overarching design or funding commitment.

"The ecosystem," the authors wrote, "remains compromised."

Despite 148 federal and 51 state environmental programs in the region, the agency found that years of studies and committees "have not resulted in significant restoration."

In May 2004, Bush announced the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration, the study project now nearing completion. The EPA's Gulezian said one goal is "to identify the things that need to be done first and in what sequence."

"It took a long time," he said, "for the Great Lakes to get to the state they're in now, and it's going to take a while to get restoration."

Then-EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said in announcing the effort -- to cautious reviews from environmentalists -- that it meant "not a redoing but a redoubling." Among the fields under review are many kinds of pollution, from runoff and industrial waste to sewage and airborne chemicals that settle in the water.

Besieged wetlands and animal habitats are being studied, along with invasive species such as the zebra mussel, round goby and sea lamprey that have changed the lakes' ecology.

Rep. Jan D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.), representing a district on the Illinois lake shore, spoke of beach closings and mercury levels. She wonders how much money a White House not known for environmental sympathies will be prepared to seek from Congress, especially given the budget strains of the war in Iraq and the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.

"They've dug themselves into such a deep hole that getting issues like this to the top of the pile is very hard," Schakowsky said. "There's a lot of show and a lot of paper. Now we've got to get resources in place."