No relief for Lake Champlain

Lots of cheery news from a joint Legislative hearing on Wednesday 2/15 concerning efforts to clean up our increasingly turgid Not-Quite-Great-Lake. The takeaway, as reported by Dave Gram of the AP:

It may take decades for Vermont to clean up Lake Champlain, where phosphorus flowing in from farms, sewage treatment plants and suburban lawns has fed toxic algae blooms in recent summers, lawmakers were told Wednesday.

…Despite working to reduce phosphorus-laden runoff for more than a decade, Vermont cannot show it has made much progress, Environmental Conservation Commissioner David Mears said in an interview. Asked how long it might take, he said, “Decades is the right scale to think about it.”

Lawmakers were getting an update on efforts by state and federal officials to set new clean-water standards for Lake Champlain, in the wake of the Conservation Law Foundation’s successful lawsuit over the old standards, which were too lax. For those keeping score at home, CLF settled the suit in 2010, EPA started working on new rules about a year ago, and it remains a work in progress. Or possibly a case of bureaucratic Four Corners Offense, trying to run down the clock as much as possible before setting new and unpalatable standards.

Several factors are contributing to the the bleak outlook. One is a lack of resources at the state or federal level to tackle such a massive cleanup. Another is the non-point-source nature of lake pollution: so many farms, so many lawns, so many rivers and streams, so much development along waterways.

And then there’s an issue that may be about to get worse.

Another problem facing the lake is silt from erosion in the rivers feeding it, Buzz Hoerr, chairman of a Vermont citizens’ panel that oversees the lake, later told a House committee during a separate hearing.

…He said Vermont needs to “get away from the culture of drainage” that had governed too much river management during the last 200 years and “just slow things down.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, are we really going to see political support for “slowing things down”? There’s already been significant pressure for enhanced drainage to help prevent future floods. Irene is likely to remain a powerful political totem for some time to come, and if the choice is between protecting Champlain or preventing a future Irene, I’d guess that most politicians are going to choose the latter.

In any case, bad news all around for the health of Lake Champlain. And this story deserves more publicity than I think it’s going to get.  

3 thoughts on “No relief for Lake Champlain

  1. Thanks for passing this along.

    A quibble with the AP article; it made it sound like the conversion of meandering streams to drainage ditches is a major problem.  Up until Irene, that was not the case.  The DEC has a good program in place for river managment.  That being said, Irene resulted in stepping back 20 years on river management policy, but we quickly were able to identify this and hopefully some of the “repairs” can be re-repaired correctly.

    I think the big takeaway was something you didn’t mention: in the Missiquoi watershed, 80% of the phosphorous problem came from 20% of the farms.  That is big, good news.  Farm runoff is the major contributor to phosphorous pollution.  If fixing 80% of that problem lies with a handful of farmers, that is relatively easy.  If the problem was evenly distributed throughout homeowners lawns, parking lot runoff, and farms, it would be an extremely long process to work through.

  2. The town decided to experiment with social change by making it easy for people to share the energy savings they were implementing. One key feature of the effort, which had a seriously outsized effect, was lawn signs. People who were participating in the program were asked to voluntarily post a lawn sign in front of their house. It turns out that this one simple act resulted in converstations about energy (and money) savings among neighbors, which in turn led to more people participating, and more lawn signs, etc. in a beneficial cycle. Once a critical mass of signs appeared in a neighborhood, the signs themselves created an atmosphere that led to whole neighborhoods joining the program.

    Could the lake communities implement a low-phosphate program with similar social elements? Maybe the towns can put together a flyer describing how and why to cut phosphate pollution, provide some kind of incentive for replacing inappropriate monoculture lawns with locally appropriate grasses (such as coupons for seed from local stores), provide classes and a pamphlet for farmers who want to cut back on fertilizers (and save money in the process), and provide a visibility element to get the conversations started among those who don’t hear about the program through the ordinary marketing channels.

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