Great Lakes Article:

About 25 million Americans live within the U.S. land mass that drains into the Great Lakes. Only 30 of them attended a regional Great Lakes hearing on Wednesday.

The lakes, creations of the Ice Age that stretch through eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, are at the center of an emerging national debate. At issue is how best to manage and restore what is the repository of 95 percent of the fresh surface water in the United States.

The four-hour hearing, at Rochester Institute of Technology, was sponsored by three state Assembly environment committees, one of them chaired by David Koon, D-Perinton. It was designed to get a citizens’ eye-view of Great Lakes issues.

”There has never been a greater need” for new research, more funding and stepped-up public attention, said Jack Manno, executive director of the Great Lakes Research Consortium in Syracuse.

Historically, he added, the stars are in alignment this year for the attention the lakes need.

Next month, a final draft of Annex 2001 will be released. Signed by Great Lakes governors and Canadian officials, it will set standards for managing all that water, a precious commodity in an increasingly thirsty world.

And two bills being debated in Congress could as early as next year provide up to $6 billion in federal funding to restore the Great Lakes, which are beset by longtime pollution, invasions of exotic species and degrading shoreline habitats.

There were 43 toxic hotspots in the Great Lakes identified 20 years ago, yet only two have been cleaned up, and both are in Canada, said Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli, D-Nassau County, who brought the hearing to Rochester.

He said that next week the Assembly will float two resolutions in the Legislature. One will prompt New York’s congressional delegation to work on federal restoration money; the other will urge the Pataki administration to fund Annex 2001.

New York has spent big sums in the last decade on lakes cleanups and programs, said presenter Donald Zelazny, the Great Lakes program coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Included: $428 million from the Clean Water, Clean Air bond act and $97 million from the state Environmental Protection Fund.

But he agreed that the lakes — fragile despite their great size — are under fire environmentally. Shoreline wetlands are disappearing. Mercury and other pollutants are sifting in from Midwest power plants. And more than 160 non-native plants and animals are unbalancing lake ecosystems.

Presenter Raymond C. Vaughan, an environmental scientist with the state Attorney General’s Office in Buffalo, called invasive species “a type of pollution” that requires stronger protections against ballast water on foreign ships plying the Great Lakes.

Accelerating ecological pressures, said Zelazny, are increasing demands for water. Annex 2001, he said, is the key to keeping management of Great Lakes water with the eight states and not ceding control to Washington.

Paul Zittel, a farmer from Erie County representing the New York Farm Bureau, agreed that regional control of water is best. And that new federal funding could help farmers plant stream buffer zones and employ trickle irrigation, two strategies to preserve and conserve lakes water.

But he said farmers oppose a cap on how much water they use, a requirement that might be written into Annex 2001.

Reg Gilbert, a presenter from the Buffalo-based advocacy group Great Lakes United, said Annex 2001 needs to be airtight legally in order to fend off likely challenges from global businesses eager to market Great Lakes water.

Drier parts of the country are getting more populous and politically powerful, he warned, while Great Lakes states are seeing the opposite trends.

There’s an imbalance of power within the eight Great Lakes states, too, said Manno. Based on demographics, total taxes paid and other measures, New York should get up to 18 percent of current federal lakes funding. Instead, it gets as little as 3 percent.

To tip the scales back, said Manno, New York needs to support a string of proposed shoreline field research stations that would attract federal money.

New York’s 200-mile Lake Ontario shoreline needs more than research stations, said Joseph Makarewicz, distinguished professor of environmental sciences and biology at the State University College at Brockport. It needs cleanup money for polluted streams, bays and harbors.

That means money for upgraded sewage treatment, eradicating of invasive plants and harbor dredging.

Only a regional approach will work, taking in all 37 coastline watersheds, 100 towns and villages and all seven affected New York counties, said Makarewicz.

He’s working with the Rochester-based Center for Environmental Information on a “north coast initiative” that divides the shoreline into three areas from the Niagara River on the west to Otter Creek in Jefferson County to the east.

The center has a $250,000 federal grant to produce by next year a north coast management plan through 2025, said vice president of programs Lee M. Loomis, a presenter.

Hugh Mitchell of Rochester, conservation chair of the Sierra Club’s 44,000-member New York chapter, said two regional issues stand out: cleaning up a heavily polluted old shipbuilding site near Round Pond in Greece and preventing water authorities from building pipelines to encourage sprawl.

Sprawl, he added, is a “toxic ecology” that boosts water rates and wastes electricity at pumping stations.

Cleaning up just toxic hotspots on the Great Lakes “would cost many billions of dollars more” than even the big federal money that could be on the way, said presenter David Higby, a lakes expert with Environmental Advocates of New York, a lobbying group in Albany.

In the meantime, he said, New York needs “a secure and reliable funding stream” for its coming share of billions in federal matching grants.