Great Lakes too valuable a resource to ignore

Five of the Great Lakes states, including Ohio, gave Donald Trump 75 of his electoral votes. Without those electoral votes, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president.

And what does Donald Trump’s proposed budget aim to do? Strangle the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The initiative’s goal is to conserve and protect Lake Erie and the other four Great Lakes, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is “the largest surface freshwater system on the Earth. Only the polar ice caps contain more fresh water.”

The EPA (created, be it remembered, by Republican Richard M. Nixon, not some pinwheel-eyed crunchy) also reports that Erie and sister lakes Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior contain “84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water [and] about 21 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water.”

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative’s current federal appropriation is $300 million a year, or 93 cents per U.S. resident (about onefourth of 1 cent per day). But the initiative isn’t something that drops bombs or launches missiles, so maybe, in eyes of Trump’s White House, it’s a big waste.

Sens. Rob Portman, a suburban Cincinnati Republican, and Sherrod Brown, a Cleveland Democrat, are among the officeholders who strongly oppose the Trump administration’s proposal.

“According to a recent study,” Portman said in a statement, “the (Initiative’s) work generates a total of more than $80 billion in benefits in health, tourism, fishing, and recreation … saves local communities like Toledo $50 million in costs, and increases property values across the region by a total of $12 billion.” As to the Great Lakes initiative, Portman has chops: For federal fiscal year 2016, Barack Obama’s administration had proposed cutting the initiative’s funding to $250 million; Portman led efforts to provide the full $300 million for the program.

Said Brown, in his statement, “Taking an ax to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative will cost Ohio jobs and jeopardize public health by putting the well-being of Lake Erie at risk … My colleagues in the Ohio delegation and I will not stand for a budget that zeroes out this critical program.”

As the “water wars” in America’s western states have demonstrated, water is a precious commodity. That’s why, given proper stewardship, the Great Lakes will remain on of the greatest resources and key economic advantages Ohio and its neighbors have. Moreover, Lake Erie produces more fish than any of the other Great Lakes. That’s not only an economic plus for the commercial fishery but also for sport fishing. The interstate Great Lakes Commission reported in 2015 that “visitors to Ohio’s Lake Erie region spend more than $10.7 billion annually — nearly 30 percent of Ohio’s total tourism dollars.” Protecting Erie and the other lakes is common-sense public policy.

That’s why the Trump administration’s proposed defunding of the Great Lakes initiative is puzzling. It ticks off some of the president’s fellow Republicans in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin — all Great Lakes states, all Trump states in November. (The other Great Lakes states are Minnesota, Illinois and New York, which voted for Hillary Clinton for president.)

Given the Trump administration’s political inexperience, junking the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is perhaps just a newbie mistake. But it’s not like the protection of natural resources is foreign to Republicans. Here’s what Theodore Roosevelt said, speaking in 1912 at Ohio’s Statehouse: “This country, as Lincoln said, belongs to the people. So do the natural resources which make it rich.”

That is, the Great Lakes are taxpayers’ assets. But they could become become wasting assets, if Congress passes Trump’s budget as it now stands.