Quality

Stateline Midwest ~ 2013 Annual Meeting Edition

If you are a boater on any of the Midwest’s abundant water resources, you may have seen the signs or been told the rules: Inspect your boat, trailer and equipment; drain the water; and remove plants, animals or mud before getting out of a body of water.

The goal is to remove any invasive species that might be hitchhiking on boats or trailers.

Aquatic invasive species have long been recognized as a serious threat, costing the U.S. economy at least $148 billion a year, according to a Cornell University study. They include plants such as salt cedar and Eurasian watermilfoil, invertebrates such as the zebra mussel, and fish such as Asian carp species.

State laws to control invasive species in the Midwest date back decades.

Stateline Midwest ~ March 2013

Since 2009, an unprecedented amount of federal money has been flowing into this region to protect and restore the Great Lakes.

On top of other existing programs in place, more than $1 billion has been allocated through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative — viewed at the time and now as a historic commitment by the federal government to clean up the lakes and protect them from ongoing threats such as invasive species.

But it is unclear whether similar levels of help can be expected on Great Lakes projects in the future, due to budget concerns and policy gridlock in the nation’s capital.

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it was fairly vague about which bodies of water would be protected by the new legislation. Supreme Court rulings over the past 12 years have done little to add much clarity to the issue.  “In 1972, Congress enacted the Clean Water Act and indicated that all its programs were designed to protect the navigable waters,” said Donna Downing, an attorney in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water. “Then in the act they defined navigable waters as meaning waters of the United States, including the territorial seas. That’s all the statute says about what waters are protected and subject to all those different Clean Water Act programs.”

CSG Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Brydon Ross outlines the top five issues for 2013, including the future of coal, Clean Water Act legal actions, energy infrastructure hardening, managing the energy wave, and EPA air regulations. 

Stateline Midwest ~ December 2012

A group of states wanting to wall off Asian carp entry into the Great Lakes via the Chicago Area Waterway System have run into another legal stumbling block. 

Stateline Midwest ~ December 2012

Every year, billions of gallons of raw sewage, trash and personal hygiene products flow into the Great Lakes. And as a 2012 report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes notes, this problem poses not only environmental and health risks (due to the bacteria, viruses and pathogens in untreated sewage), but has economic costs as well (the forced closure of beaches, for example).