The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking comment on the next phase of an Obama-era Great Lakes program that has become one of the region’s largest for environmental cleanups and wildlife restoration over the past 13 years, including several projects in Toledo and northwest Ohio.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is rooted in action former President George W. Bush took in the early 2000s, long before Barack Obama won his first term as president in 2008.

At the time, Mr. Bush authorized the most comprehensive study of what the Great Lakes needed to recover fully, a yearlong effort that included work from a task force of 1,500 people. Many came from across the United States and Canada and the Great Lakes region’s 35 tribal nations.

The first-ever inventory of its kind was released in 2005. But the Bush administration never funded it, citing the war in Iraq and recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina as bigger priorities.

Mr. Obama pledged to fund it during his 2008 presidential campaign.

The GLRI began in 2010 with $475 million. Congress then settled on figures in the low $300 million-a-year range for several years. In the current fiscal year, funding has grown to $368 million, up from $20 million the year before, Chris Korleski, U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office director, recalled during a two-hour webinar on Tuesday.

The GLRI also got an additional $1 billion boost from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate cleanups, he noted.

Many of the GLRI projects are administered through the U.S. EPA’s Great Lakes National Program Office. But the initiative is a cross-cutting program that involves several agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others that are part of the U.S. Department of Interior. 

Every five years, the GLRI works under a new action plan. It is currently in the third plan, and is taking comments as it develops the fourth. The fourth action plan will span 2025-2029, Mr. Korleski, a former Ohio EPA director, said.

“The money is great. But equally important are the partnerships,” he said.

Programs have evolved as priorities have shifted. The GLRI is now more focused on environmental justice and climate change issues, Mr. Korleski said.

Throughout the webinar, the agency heard from officials working on projects across the Great Lakes basin, from New York to Wisconsin.

Nobody from the Toledo area was on the agenda. But this part of the Great Lakes region is known as the Maumee Area of Concern, one of many identified as such by the U.S.-Canada International Joint Commission in the late 1980s because of pollution. It is one of several areas of concern around the Great Lakes where most work — except for long-term monitoring — is expected to be done by the end of the decade.

Invasive species and agricultural runoff comprised two of the multiple categories during the webinar.

Much of the discussion about invasive species was about continued threats by bighead and silver carp in the Illinois River. Efforts are continuing to keep them from getting into Lake Michigan near Chicago. Experts have said that type of breach could devastate the Great Lakes region’s $7 billion fishery, including the Maumee River and western Lake Erie, which have the highest percentage of fish and the most spawning. Sportfishing also is one of the biggest eco-tourism industries in Ohio and Michigan.

Santina Wortman, U.S. EPA Great Lakes scientist, said the GLRI has been used — in combination with other state and federal programs — to fund more programs aimed at reducing agricultural runoff through voluntary incentives for farmers.

The agency is most focused on reducing nutrient runoff in the Maumee River, the Saginaw River, and the Fox River watersheds to protect western Lake Erie, Michigan’s Saginaw Bay, and Wisconsin’s Green Bay, respectively. They are the three largest parts of the system prone to agricultural runoff.

“We tend to focus on where we’re going to see the greatest impacts to the nearshore areas of the Great Lakes,” Ms. Wortman said.

GLRI money also has been used for outreach programs, demonstration farms, and to help more women get into farming, she said.

“We find that peer-to-peer farming really helps with outreach,” Ms. Wortman said.

The fourth GLRI action plan will likely promote more voluntary programs and fund more demonstration farms, she said.

It also will likely continue to build on efforts to reduce stormwater runoff in urban corridors, especially in underserved areas, Ms. Wortman said.

First Published June 27, 2023, 10:06 p.m.