Sustain lake cleanup

Ohio has no more important natural resource than Lake Erie. Greater Toledo’s drinking water comes from the lake, which makes the environmental quality of Lake Erie important to every resident.

While recent assessments of the western basin of Lake Erie as the most environmentally endangered area in the entire Great Lakes is worrisome, Gov. Mike DeWine’s commitment to lake water quality is reassuring.

The governor wants to resurrect efforts to fund the H2Ohio program with a 10-year, billion-dollar bond program to bring more famers into the voluntary program and to create more wetlands as a natural filter of farm runoff.

The International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes, comprised of U.S. and Canadian appointees, has identified livestock waste from concentrated animal feeding operations as the source of algal blooms in Lake Erie. Governor DeWine says Ohio has cut the phosphorous load in Lake Erie by 20 percent through the H2Ohio program and is making progress toward the 40 percent reduction established through the IJC as the goal.

The governor does not support the IJC call for regulatory requirements on CAFO’s that treat these large livestock feeding farms as factories. But in reality, that’s not a state issue. The IJC stipulates that effective, enforceable regulation as the answer to Great Lakes water quality protection must be enacted at the national level by the U.S. and Canada.

If all Ohio can effectively do regarding by far the worst pollution problem in all of the Great Lakes, on the shore of Toledo, is H2Ohio, the program must be sustained with a guaranteed funding source.

While the legislature has been supportive of the DeWine Administrative initiative, it’s imperative that the Lake Erie water quality project is exempt from changed priorities of a future governor or budget constraints in future General Assemblies.

Governor DeWine reminded The Blade Editorial Board in a video conference Wednesday that he had told Ohioans from the very beginning of the H2Ohio program that measurable improvement would come slowly, but would come and would be sustained. There is no denying that H2Ohio has made good on that promise, but the environmental experts paint a bleak picture for the western basin of Lake Erie without enforceable regulations protecting the waterways from manure runoff from factory farms.

Now Ohio needs to assure continuity of the H20hio program with a dedicated funding source. The legislature’s refusal to support a bond issue raises a legitimate concern that commitment to Lake Erie water quality will wither without a governor touting the program.

We believe lawmakers who agree with the governor and oppose federal regulations on farm runoff would be wise to support an alternative like H2Ohio. Environmentalists in both the U.S. and Canada are calling for laws that would bring strict new regulation to farmers.

Without a long term commitment to H2Ohio there is no alternative to federal regulation.