Biden: Infrastructure plan gives $1B for Great Lakes cleanup
LORAIN, Ohio – President Joe Biden declared Thursday that a $1 billion infusion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal would restore the Great Lakes harbors and tributary rivers that have been polluted by industrial toxins.
The president ventured close to the banks of Lake Erie to speak in Lorain, Ohio, a small city that once housed a shipbuilder, a Ford plant and a U.S. Steel factory and is now adapting to a post-industrial economy. Biden pledged that the investment in cleaning the waterways was as much about jobs as the environment, citing a note that Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur – who attended Thursday’s event – handed to him after an address last year to a joint session of Congress.
“That letter was about the Great Lakes,” the president said. “(They) support more than 1.3 million jobs in manufacturing tourism, transportation, warehousing, farming and fishing.”
Biden’s trip to northeast Ohio comes at a crucial political moment as the state’s Republican Sen. Rob Portman, Biden’s partner on the infrastructure deal, is retiring. That has left open a Senate seat this year that Democrats hope to claim, despite the state’s swing toward the GOP.
The $1 billion for the Great Lakes from the bipartisan measure enacted in November, combined with annual funding through an ongoing recovery program, will enable agencies by 2030 to finish work on 22 sites designated a quarter-century ago as among the region’s most degraded, officials said Thursday.
The lakes provide drinking water for 40 million people and underpin the economy in eight Northeastern and Midwestern states and two Canadian provinces. They fueled a 20th century industrial boom that generated wealth and jobs but caused ecological devastation.
Notorious images from the region including flames on the surface of the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie at Cleveland, helped inspire enactment of the Clean Water Act and other signature environmental laws.
The U.S. and Canada listed 43 sites – 31 of them in the U.S. – as toxic hot spots in 1987, largely because of contaminated sediments that make the waters unsuitable for fishing, swimming and other uses.
But while cleanup plans were crafted, they languished with little funding until the Obama administration kicked off the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2010.
Because of progress under the initiative, which has received nearly $4 billion, the Environmental Protection Agency has dropped six areas of concern from the list and finished work at 11 others.
The more than 6,000 projects funded under the restoration initiative also deal with some of the lakes’ other biggest problems. They include invasive species such as quagga mussels that unravel food chains.