How $1B in federal aid for Great Lakes will clean up 9 areas in Michigan by 2030

Washington — A historic $1 billion for the federal Great Lakes restoration program from the bipartisan infrastructure bill will speed the cleanup of nine damaged areas in Michigan to completion by 2030, officials said Thursday.

The Michigan areas to be cleaned up, including the Detroit, Rouge and Clinton rivers, are among 25 in the lakes region designated as "areas of concern" due to environmental degradation largely caused by industrial pollution, urban development and agriculture runoff.   

President Joe Biden announced the new funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative during a trip Thursday to Lorain, Ohio, noting that the United States and Canada over three decades ago made a commitment to restore polluted waterways and habitats that flow into the freshwater lakes.

"For decades, there was a lot of talk, a lot of plans but very little progress. It was slow. That changes today," Biden said. 

"We're gonna accelerate cleanup of sites across six states in the Great Lakes Basin, from Duluth, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Gary, Indiana; Buffalo, New York; and everywhere in between. And we know these sites were dangerously polluted for decades. We’re committed to clean them up."

The money, to be released over five years, is the largest-ever spending for the program and is in addition to the annual funding approved by Congress, the White House said. Congress has voted to increase the initiative’s annual funding to $375 million for the 2022 fiscal year and raise the aid $25 million per year until it reaches $475 million in 2026.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new spending would make "unprecedented progress" in the agency's efforts to restore and protect waterways and communities in the Great Lakes basin.

Senior administration officials said the bulk of the new funding will be directed at accelerating the cleanup of critical waterways and areas of concern, adding that several of the larger, complex areas like Detroit and Milwaukee are estimated to cost well over $100 million each. 

The nonpartisan Alliance For the Great Lakes said it's been asking for federal aid in cleaning up the "toxic" hot spots since 1987, when the U.S. and Canada designated 43 areas of concern in the lakes with pollutants such as heavy metals and PCBs and that could not support recreation or habitat for wildlife.

“Today’s commitment has been a long time coming, but the Alliance is thankful that Congress has recognized the need for this investment," said Don Jodrey, director of federal relations at the alliance. 

"We’re eager to get to work alongside our partners in Michigan to make progress so that these beautiful cities and rivers can once again be places where current and future Great Lakes residents can enjoy time outdoors without worrying about the effect on their health.”

'Insanely expensive' projects

The injection of money is targeting "legacy" contamination of the Great Lakes left behind by decades of industry in the heartland that deposited harmful chemicals and metals that now reside in bottom sediments, harming the health of fish and making the areas unsuitable for some kinds of recreation, said Debra Shore, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

"A lot of the work requires dredging and removing this contaminated sediment. It's hard to do. It's costly," Shore said in a Thursday interview. 

"What this billion-dollar injection into the program over the next five years will allow us to do is to commission more of that dredging to be done in more places and to proceed more rapidly with the extensive work that's required."

Other cleanup work for the Michigan sites could include stabilizing streambank erosion, restoring habitats for fish and wildlife, dam removal, lake or wetland restoration, and pollution prevention. 

As they work toward completing the cleanup, officials often set interim goals for each targeted area, such as lifting restrictions on drinking water, fish and wildlife consumption, beach closings, the elimination of deformities in fish, animals and other wildlife.

The EPA estimates that physical work will be completed at the Detroit and Rouge River areas of concern by 2030, and at Clinton River and Torch Lake by 2026.

The Rouge River watershed is one of the most significantly affected areas of concern in the Great Lakes, and the new funding will bolster the timeline for its cleanup, said Marie McCormick, executive director of Friends of the Rouge.

"We still have a laundry list of projects that require funding. I'm looking right now at 15-plus projects — some of which are insanely expensive," McCormick said. 

She gave as an example the removal of a concrete channel on a four-mile piece of the main stem of the Rouge River that was built in the 1970s to help offset flooding would occur as a result of the build-out of Fairlane mall in Dearborn. 

Other projects on the Rouge list include habitat improvements at Phoenix Lake and Wilcox Lake as well as wetland creation and streambank stabilization at Inkster Park, she said.

"Not only are they important for the fish and for the other habitat, they're also important for the human communities that are adjacent to or next to them," McCormick said. "There's so many co-benefits that happen as a result of the funding that is allocated for these projects in really improving communities holistically."

Building in access

After the physical work is completed at each site, monitoring begins for a period of up to five or so years to ensure that the remediated area responds as expected and meets certain criteria before it is delisted — removed from a list as an area of concern. 

Physical work has already been completed at several Michigan areas of concern including the River Raisin, St. Clair River, Manistique River, Muskegon Lake and St. Marys River, according to the EPA, though they've not yet been delisted. 

Three areas of concern in Michigan were already cleaned up over the last 30 years and delisted: the Deer Lake, White Lake and Lower Menominee River areas.

EPA officials aim to complete work at 16 total areas of concern across the Great Lakes Basin by 2030 to the point of delisting them, with another nine to go. They include six where scientists say that time and nature will have to heal over the rest of the damage after their remediation concludes.

The EPA expects there will be three areas of concern remaining for the agency and its partners to complete remediation after 2030. They include the Saginaw and Kalamazoo rivers — both of which must wait on Superfund brownfield cleanup to wrap up, officials said. 

Cleaning up these areas is expected to help neighboring communities by providing greater access to clean water but also by adding green spaces and possibly increased recreation and tourism from fishing, swimming or hiking, the officials said.

The EPA indicated it would award the new funding in line with the Biden administration's environmental justice initiative that aims to send at least 40% of the overall benefits from "key" federal investments to underserved communities.

"Many of these areas of concern do lie next to or near underserved, overburdened communities, so cleaning them up is going to benefit the people who live near there a great deal," EPA's Shore said.

"We want to build in, when possible, access so that people in nearby communities can get to revitalized waterfronts and have access to the waterway."

Shore said she also sees an opportunity for workforce development to train people in the local communities to install and maintain green infrastructure as part of a habitat restoration or to help construct wetlands that may be part of the remediation project.

U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, and Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, called the new funding a "game changer" for Michigan.

"At a time when our Great Lakes are facing increasing pressures from new contamination, invasive species and the climate crisis, completing the restoration of these areas is critically important to the health of our waters," said Stabenow, who helped create the GLRI program in 2010. 

The new funding from the infrastructure bill is also expected to free up spending that would have originally been devoted to cleaning up areas of concern, allowing the EPA to redirect it to other priorities such as nutrient reduction and climate change, officials said.