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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July > 25 > Entry
Ellen Belcher: Regulators can’t fix Grand Lake St. Marys
You can say a lot of things about Grand Lake St. Marys.
You could, for instance, argue that what has happened there is Ohio’s Hurricane Katrina. No, the bacteria explosion hasn’t killed anyone; the debacle is man-made; and the devastation isn’t nearly as sweeping. But there are the questions such as: do you rebuild, should you rebuild, can you rebuild.
Just as there were people who said New Orleans shouldn’t be brought back, at least not in its old form, there are people who think Ohio’s largest inland lake will cost too much to save or simply isn’t compatible with the concentration of nearby animal farms.
You also could liken the toxic algae jungle that caused authorities to tell everyone to stay away from the lake to the BP disaster. The ecological and economic damage isn’t as widespread, but ask the people who own marinas or restaurants or have property on the lake if they feel the Gulf fishermen’s pain. Certainly, the tension between agribusiness and property owners and recreational users at the lake is not unlike that between the oil industry and those who depend on the Gulf waters.
You could also say that Grand Lake St. Marys’ comatose state is that community’s Sherwin-Williams fire. In 1987, a Sherwin-Williams paint warehouse that had been built near Dayton’s wellfield caught on fire. It burned for a week because dousing it would have sent toxic chemicals flowing straight to the drinking water source for several hundred thousand people.
The wellfield could have become worthless. The cleanup after the fire cost between $10 million and $12 million.
Two years prior, the Los Angeles Times had run a front-page story trashing Dayton’s drinking water, saying it was alarmingly polluted. But it took the fire to really gig people into admitting that it was insane to have an industrial park so close to such a sensitive and precious resource.
A year after the fire, Dayton passed a wellfield-protection ordinance that limits the kinds of businesses that can locate near its wellfields, and suburban jurisdictions followed suit. (Water doesn’t recognize governmental boundaries.)
The wellfield-protection rules restrict development on and near the wellfields, and they established a system that limits the amount and kind of chemicals that can be used in the area. Incentives and a loan fund were created to help businesses switch to less hazardous processes and products. And a surcharge was put on ratepayers.
Because of the rules, certain kinds of businesses have been turned away from the restricted areas; some companies have been moved, using money from the surcharge. Lawyers have defended the rules against companies looking to skirt them.
Dayton’s regional compact — its carrots as well as its sticks — is an international model, one that people from around the world have come here to learn about. Today the drinking water quality is excellent.
If Grand Lake St. Marys is going to come back to life, it’s going to take this sort of regional, multi-jurisdictional effort.
Another point worth remembering is that it wasn’t the federal or state government that ultimately provided the protection for Dayton’s seemingly boundless aquifer. (Ninety million gallons of water can be pulled out of the aquifer every day, and that registers as barely a sip.)
The regulators were certainly hounding Dayton — which was the water retailer. But ultimately the rules, backed up with incentives, were decided and written by local people — environmentalists, chamber of commerce reps, farmers, business owners and government types.
Distant regulators can only do so much, even when they think something is going terribly wrong. They can throw around their weight, but, in the end, for a problem like Grand Lake St. Marys, it’s the local people who are going to have to come together to get creative and decide if they want to bring back — or bury — the lake.
In Dayton, walling off thousands of acres to certain kinds of development wasn’t easy. But the alternative was to live with the possibility that if a spark went off in the wrong place, an entire region’s drinking water would go up in smoke. A decision that, at the time, was controversial now looks only sensible.
Grand Lake St. Marys isn’t on fire, but it may as well be. It will take local people taking a stand to get everybody to understand what must be done.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Ellen Belcher, Rural Communities, Sports and Recreation
Comments
By Max
July 25, 2010 11:39 AM | Link to this
Ellen, other than taking exception to the ‘Katrina’ analogy (I saw the results of that), I gnerally agree with your overview. St. Marys is a State Park and, yes, the locals in Celina and St. Marys should take the initiative to allow the lake to recover. BUT, blaming farm run-off as the sole cause of the problem is to ignore the physical evidence of IR and conventional images over the past 10 years concerning development all around the lake. We must remember the area has been farmed long before it was what it is today. True, new agricultural fertilizers are used, but, old pesticides, such as DDT, are not. This is a cumulative, ‘carryingcapacity’ issue where the lake cannot absorb both development and agricultural byproducts and remain healthy. Unfortunately, it takes a problem like this to serve as a wakeup call that inconvenient adjustments will have to be made if the lake is to recover in the shortest time possible.
By davidss2
July 25, 2010 12:16 PM | Link to this
The parallel is not to Katrina but to the Gulf fiasco where Obama didn’t react at the beginning to ask for all kinds of help from other countries and allow foreign ships to operate to help skim and collect the oil. This was manmade; the Grand Lake problem is manmade.—————I know it hurts the democrats to realize Katrina was a natural disaster where the democrat mayor had used money otherwise than preparing for evacuation and the mayor didn’t mandate an evacuation despite the dire warnings of the hurricane’s size and potential. The democrat governor didn’t ask for the Fed’s help—that’s required. The Feds can’t just come in and take over a state, no matter what the Dems and Obama want to do with Arizona for campaign fodder to try to pretend like Obama is not a racist pro black. He’s trying to keep the deaf black vote that got him in and trying not to lose the white vote that fell for the campaign rhetoric and the mainstream media manipulation of the negative news about Obama during the campaign.
By former Celinian
July 25, 2010 12:31 PM | Link to this
I lived in Celina 25 years ago. The major difference is the number of animals on farms. Period. Even Robert Boggs has stated that there is not enough acreage to support the number of livestock raised in Mercer County. And I don’t see how you can increase the amount of land. Factory farmers are the main culprits and Big Ag has Ohio politicians in their front and back pockets.