President Barack Obama wants to spend $475 million over the next 12
months to clean up the Great Lakes. He calls it a down payment on a
campaign promise to invest at least $5 billion -- and probably much
more -- in a Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to deal with invasive
species, contaminated sediments, degraded habitats, runoff pollution
and other threats.
All that's in addition to billions in the stimulus
bill and the fiscal 2010 budget request to upgrade sewers and clean
up what flows into the lakes.
Environmental advocates call it the biggest financial commitment
ever made to the Great Lakes.
Jim White wants Greater Cleveland -- the place whose burning river
helped ignite the modern environmental movement 40 years ago Monday
-- to help Obama spend that money.
White heads the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization, a
nonprofit created by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in 1988
to oversee cleanup of the river and its watershed.
While that remains a work in progress, the Cuyahoga is no longer
an international symbol of environmental decay.
Instead, it's a positive example of what can happen when outrage
and embarrassment lead to four decades of sustained investment and
innovation.
As Plain Dealer reporter Michael Scott has noted in his "Year of the River" series,
fish and outdoor enthusiasts have rediscovered the Cuyahoga.
Industry and public utilities have dramatically cleaned up their
acts.
The river's comeback truly is a success story that this region needs
to tell again and again as it tries to shed its rust belt reputation.
The story involves enlightened private investment, spurred in part
by tough government regulation.
The comeback story involves public investments that were both wise
and lucky -- the Cuyahoga Valley National Park wasn't necessarily created
to clean up the river, but nurturing a 22-mile riparian corridor helped
do exactly that. It involves communities learning to cooperate and
realizing that when it comes to water, we really are all in it together.
Along the way, scientists and engineers working in academia and for
enterprises as divergent as the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District
and steelmaker ArcelorMittal have developed know-how that White thinks
can give birth to an industry cluster, get more of those federal dollars
flowing into Cleveland and foster a new generation of "clean-tech" jobs.
"Military-industrial contractors do it all the time," says White. "When
the Pentagon announces a new program, they organize themselves around
getting federal investment. We need to organize ourselves and think
about how we can partner with the federal government to help them solve
their environmental agenda."
In other words, turn clean water, here and throughout the
Great Lakes and beyond in a world desperate for water, into good jobs.
Here's an example of what White envisions: A few years ago, he gathered
a "tiger team" of local experts to brainstorm on how to help
the young fish spawned upstream in the Cuyahoga make their way to Lake
Erie. The trip traditionally gets hazardous in the industrial waterway
through Cleveland, where the banks are defined by steel plates with
few of the nooks or vegetation found in nature. If you're a fish, that
means no food or shelter.
The scientists came up with an idea for "green bulkheads" --
a cool name for what are essentially rubber flower pots hung along
the banks. Rubber, to withstand the occasional brush with an enormous
barge or freighter.
To make these "Cuyahoga habitat underwater baskets," White's
team turned to an old-line Cleveland manufacturer, Custom Rubber Corp.
"We collaborated with people who knew fish, people who knew water quality and people who knew plants. We knew rubber products," says company Chairman Bill Braun, a rower and boater emotionally invested in the river. "It
was a lot of fun."
The baskets went out last year and are still being evaluated.
If they work -- and early signs are encouraging -- White thinks they
could be sold in cities around the Great Lakes that aren't nearly as
far along in cleaning up their rivers or waterfronts.
To White, the lesson of the green bulkheads is that by combining
the talent of this region's colleges and universities with the technical
savvy built up over decades of waterfront restoration and Greater Cleveland's
manufacturing base, a new industry could emerge. He thinks that will
help innovative start-ups like MAR Systems, a Solon firm that has patented
a way of removing heavy metals from water, get on a faster track and
encourage other entrepreneurs to locate here.
He's not alone.
There have been other discussions here about how to encourage water-based
industries, and Julius Ciaccia, executive director of the sewer district,
sees his organization evolving into a convenor for water-resource initiatives.
With storm-water runoff now a major concern in Washington, Ciaccia
hopes a mix of big engineering efforts, regulations and incentives
will spark innovation.
"The program drives the market," says Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells,
the sewer district's manager of environmental programs.
The good news, says Alliance for the Great Lakes CEO Cameron Davis,
who is about to join the Obama administration, is that while that market
is potentially huge, "nobody's cornered it yet."
That said, Milwaukee has a head start, thanks largely to
Rich Meeusen, who runs Badger Meter, a 103-year- old maker of water
controls.
Two years ago, he helped organize the Milwaukee Water Council. It
now includes 123 companies, many with roots in the city's famed breweries
and tanneries. In partnership with local colleges -- the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is starting a Fresh Water Institute -- and government,
they aim to make Milwaukee the Silicon Valley of water technology.
"I have yet to find anybody who doesn't get it," says Meeusen. "I
think a lot of cities around the Great Lakes are going to have an opportunity
in this area."
Maybe even the one whose burning river woke up a nation
four decades ago.
