Toledo Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson made the right — but late — call Thursday when she announced that the city will resume daily testing of Lake Erie water for the toxin that poisoned the region’s water supply last year. Nothing short of such a testing regimen, for the rest of this year’s algae-bloom season, is likely to reassure local consumers of the safety of their drinking water.
Government regulators, scientists, and environmental activists continue to monitor a harmful algae bloom near the Toledo water system’s intake in western Lake Erie. A similar bloom last August generated an unacceptably high level of the toxin microcystin in water processed by the city’s Collins Park treatment plant, requiring a do-not-drink advisory for three days that affected nearly 500,000 area residents.
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Reports of this year’s bloom have caused local consumers to hoard bottled water, as they did during last year’s emergency. So it was inexplicable that city officials said this week they planned to test raw Lake Erie water only weekly for the toxin, even as measured microcystin levels were rising, albeit still safe.
Microcystin’s presence in the water supply can be readily managed if it is detected quickly enough. In excessive concentrations, though, it can cause liver and kidney damage.
Public pressure apparently forced Mayor Hicks-Hudson to reverse the earlier misjudgment on testing by her administration. But it offers only the latest instance of the mayor seeming to rely on city bureaucrats for bad policy advice. Other examples include the city’s counterproductive secrecy over its negotiations with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to maintain Jeep Wrangler production in Toledo, and the mayor’s efforts to distance herself from the festering dispute between Fire Chief Luis Santiago and the city firefighters’ union.
If city officials should have learned anything from last year’s water emergency, which occurred before Ms. Hicks-Hudson became mayor, it is that more than soothing words are needed to maintain public trust and ease understandable concerns. A city spokesman justified the cutback in water testing by noting that the curtailed schedule still would exceed Ohio Environmental Protection Agency mandates, as if that were the best standard to apply.
The initial switch to weekly testing suggested a denial by the city of the threat to its water system, rather than the proactive approach that remains essential. City officials cannot afford to forget that the water crisis, which occurred a year ago this weekend, was a national and even global humiliation for Toledo.
The bad publicity evidently caused some potential businesses and residents to avoid the region, and a reprise this year could be expected to have the same effect. Although meaningful measures have been taken over the past year to cleanse Lake Erie of toxic algae, the time surely has not come — if it ever will — for relaxed vigilance.
For now, the city’s water supply remains safe, and there is no cause for public overreaction. But if the vacillating response to tracking the current toxic bloom is a test of Mayor Hicks-Hudson’s leadership, barely three months before this year’s election, then her score on that test is at best incomplete.
First Published July 31, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
