Advocates: Federal Role Crucial For Iconic Waterway Cleanups

Cleaning up the nation's iconic waterways is a team effort involving all levels of government, with nonprofit groups, universities and other players pitching in and the federal government serving as coach and sometimes as referee. The proposed Environmental Protection Agency budget for fiscal 2018 released Tuesday calls for eliminating a series of initiatives targeting regional waters plagued with pollution that threatens human health, kills fish and harms tourism. "The great threat is that you lose faith among state agencies and local communities that the federal government will do their share," said Brian Moore, the National Audubon Society's policy director for the Gulf of Mexico, another waterway with a cleanup program that would be defunded under the Trump budget. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has provided funds to remove contaminated sediments from harbors, fight invasive species, restore wildlife habitat and study harmful algal blooms — the most severe problems affecting the world's largest freshwater system. Cameron Davis, who oversaw the Great Lakes initiative as a former EPA senior adviser, said it was crucial in uniting the region around a strategy for preventing invasive Asian carp from reaching the lakes through a Chicago-area canal at a time when the states were feuding over the matter in court. Under the program, he said, the federal government brings funding, technical assistance and "a willingness to call out a state that is not participating and therefore dragging the collective group down."

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