International Joint Commission
Transcript of Public Hearing
International Upper Great Lakes Study Board Final Report
Grosse Pointe War Memorial, 32 Lakeshore Drive
Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan
Tuesday, July 10, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.
LANA POLLACK:
(Chairperson, U.S. Section, International Joint
Commission): ...so, let’s find my…how about Jim Eggett?
JIM EGGETT: Yes.
LANA POLLACK: If you’d like to…
JIM EGGETT: (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: Yeah, wait…there, please. Yeah, because this is
being recorded and other commissioners who are not on or elsewhere will listen
and we’ll listen to their hearings. Thank you.
JIM EGGETT: Thank you. I think this is a wonderful opportunity. And I
have a Montana connection – my father is from Great Falls. When you think
about Montana, it’s the only state that touches three Canadian provinces, what is
it, Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
RICH
MOY
(Commissioner,
U.S.
Section,
International
Commission): Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
JIM EGGETT: Oh, British Columbia.
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Joint
RICH MOY: But you are right. You know, you’re one of the very few
people to actually know that. (LAUGHS)
LANA POLLACK: Including the Canadians. (LAUGHS)
UNIDENTIFIED: I knew that! (LAUGHS)
LANA POLLACK: All right, sorry (inaudible)...oops, I forgot you were
looking over my shoulder there…
JIM EGGETT: And here’s from British Columbia, he’s over there in
Vancouver, right?
UNIDENTIFIED: I’m keeping an eye on you guys.
JIM EGGETT: Okay, my name is Jim Eggett and I am local coordinator,
and I am representing Food and Water Watch, although I’ve done issues with the
Sierra Club, with Wayne County, Commissioner Killeen (?) and Diane Webb (?).
Anyway, I am here today representing the Food and Water Watch and our
116,843 supporters in the Great Lakes region. Food and Water Watch is a
national 501 (c) (3) consumers organization that works to ensure that all people
have access to safe, affordable, and sustainable produced food and water.
The Great Lakes are facing serious, urgent problems including pollution,
invasive species, declining fish stocks, eutrophic…
LANA POLLACK: Eutrophication. I’ve practiced. (LAUGHS)
JIM EGGETT: …and declining lake levels. Now many of the threats
facing the lakes are a direct result of private companies being allowed to claim
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ownership over the lakes. And the Great Lakes are a common resource which
deserve to be protected as Sierra (?) Commons and a protected bio-region and
public trust. Public trust doctrine declares that the water belongs to the public
and should be protected and preserved for the public. I like it when you shake
your head – oh, and I love your husband’s work (?) too, by the way.
Food and Water Watch, along with our partners at Flow Water and the
Manitoulin Area Stewardship, believe that in order to secure a bright future for
the people, natural systems and biocommunity of the Great Lakes basin, the IJC
should – and I guess this is where we have our little diss – initiate an accelerated
review of additional St. Clair River, and possibly the Niagara River, regulation
options, including relevant advanced modern technologies – because I know all
that is in the study; begin rapid development of a multi-lake regulation and
management framework, including a binational regulation board; begin rapid
development and implementation of Lake Huron and Michigan management
plans similar to the Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River plan – as designed
to restore more natural fluctuating of water levels; and finally to facilitate and
take leadership role – that’s what the IJC should do – in the work begun by the
Great Lakes Commission and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative
to revise the Chicago River diversion. Thank you very much.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you very much. I appreciate those thoughtful
comments. And I will next ask Andrew…I think it’s Devon (?) ?
ANDREW DORMAN: Can I wait?
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LANA POLLACK: Well, you can wait if you can encourage any of the
other people in the room to speak. There are exactly two people who asked to
speak, which…like I said, last night we had 30 people and they all spoke, which
was interesting. And I invite anybody who wants to reconsider, but maybe you
will inspire them to do so.
ANDREW DORMAN: Hi, my name is Andrew Dorman (?), I live in
Grosse Point Farms. I’m glad we got to have these meetings and share this plan.
I had a chance to read the summary, so I was watching the presentation,
I’d like to hear some more details about how this new plan is different or
improved from the 1977A plan. And I haven’t had a chance to read the full book,
but it was pretty general. Is there anything that you could share in some detail for
us, to help understand how these little changes…what’s going to be different, that
they can react to…
LANA POLLACK: Well, let me say we’ll try and…okay, I was going to
ask you if you had any other comments or questions before we turn to that. Not
to put anybody on the spot, and we have plenty of staff here, but I would ask if
either Jonathan…Professor Bulkley or Ms. Phelps (?) would like to comment on
that, as members of the Study Board. And if so, can I ask you to come to the
mic? I know this is not...you were not coming to… Thank you. Especially since
this was…like I said, I didn’t ask you to come to do this.
JONATHAN BULKLEY (U.S. Member, International Upper Great Lakes
Study Board): Well, commissioners and audience, it is a complex report. We
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spent five years on this undertaking. And to focus on the differences between the
plans, we had nine criteria that we used to evaluate alternative plans.
And the idea or the concept and what we tried to put in practice was to
ensure that whatever plan is recommended to the commissioners would meet or
exceed the benefits associated with Plan 1977A. So exceed or not be any less
than, equal or exceed.
Now there were I think four criteria that dealt strictly with levels. And so
what happened in the study, we developed or the staff developed it was 13 metabasin supply sequences, and these were generated from historic records, from
looking at tree rings, all kinds of information to try and get a sense of what the
historic basin supplies were from analysis of available information.
We had records for 109 years available to us on flows and levels. Some of
the flow data and the level data was suspect because the information wasn’t, well,
necessarily measured according to Hoyle, but that was the nature of our situation.
At any rate, every candidate plan that came up was then subject to each of
these meta-basin supply algorithms or databases, and they did it on 109 years of
information, on a monthly basis, so you have 12 X 109, something - I should be
able to do that in my head – something over 1,200 months of information.
And so given those basin supplies, the calculations were done on what
would be the resulting levels in Lake Superior, Michigan-Huron, and do they
meet these criteria, these nine criteria. And the first four had to do with levels,
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and either they met them or they didn’t. So that was a way of beginning to
eliminate alternative plans.
There were also three, perhaps four that had a dollar value associated wit
them. And I’ll be truthful, it took me quite a while to figure out exactly what we
were measuring and how we were comparing these.
And I think the simplest way that I can understand it is that each plan,
candidate plan, was compared directly with 1977A. And if the hydrologic…or
the hydroelectric benefits calculated by the (inaudible) model exceeded those of
1977A, then that plan would be kept into place.
But it had to do it for
hydroelectric power production, reduction in the cost of shipping, and also greater
shoreline protection. Those were the three.
And I’m sorry, I know I’m literally (inaudible) going on here…
LANA POLLACK: No, no, we can all see why people pay good tuition to
come to Professor Bulkley’s class. Thank you, please go ahead.
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Well, maybe…is this beginning to respond to
your question, Sir?
ANDREW DORMAN: Well, I read the report, I understand that, but I was
just curious, you know, they did all the models (inaudible)...not harm, but I was
just curious, what things can you recommend, what are they going to do
differently or…
LANA POLLACK: What’s going to be better?
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JONATHAN BULKLEY: Well, according to the studies…and believe
me, as an engineer, you have to be careful about models, okay? I should have
said that upfront, I’ll say it now.
You know, this is the very best we could do in the time we had and the
information we had. I think it’s fair to say none of us know with certainty what’s
going to happen. I would also say I think we have a pretty good feeling that
we’ve taken all of the steps we can to mitigate up to now against catastrophes
happening.
I mean, I strongly hope…well, I support the adaptive management
approach because there, we’re going to be watching – or you’re going to be
watching, if you proceed with it – what’s going on and see if you can detect
additional changes.
But the plan selected, (inaudible) Lake Superior recommended, and Lake
Superior 2012 has superior hydroelectric benefits, as measured by this study,
reduces the cost of navigation in comparison to 1977A, it also reduces the
shoreline protection costs. So those were three factors that came into play.
Also, I think it’s very important…additional flow meters. We didn’t have
meters on the connecting channels. We’ve got four meters now that weren’t there
when we started. I mean, we were calculating flows by level and velocity, but
now we’re measuring it.
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The weather stations, one in Michigan-Huron, one in Superior, they hadn’t
been there before. So now, for the first time, we’ve got Great Lakes evaporation
on the lakes. That’s a very important step.
LANA POLLACK: If I can just…tell me if this is accurate, as a member
and an academic on the Study Board. What we have is I think – I’ve done a
reading on this – three things.
Besides the benefits that Mr. Bulkley has enumerated, I think the plan
attempts to use current knowledge – which is greater than the knowledge that we
had in 1990, when the last adaptation was done – to manage better for the
extremes, to anticipate extreme highs and extreme lows and to be prepared for
those.
It’s essentially a tweaking of it. When they went through all this and a lot
of work was done, they didn’t find that the current plan was grossly flawed. They
found that they could recommend a plan that they believe will work better in the
extremes and better on those three measures by a little bit.
But I think it’s fair to say that should the Commission accept this and
recommend it to the governments and we move forward with these changes,
you’re not going to see huge changes from the operation of a new plan. You may
see big changes, but those will probably be driven by climate change and
different precipitation and things that are outside our capacity as humans to
regulate, at least in the short term.
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And the other thing that I would say that I got out of this, the reading of
this – and I think it’s a gift, well, there’s a couple of big gifts from the Study
Board – one is better knowledge and understanding. So there’s just more new
science. These are complex systems and this will help us understand them.
But the main thing is, the lesson is…there’s an adaptive management
section in there, and that means get prepared, folks, for change.
That
means…and I’m looking at people who have responsibility in local governments
for where your water intakes are and how your systems operate and where you
allow people to build and what you invest in your shoreline protections or natural
soft shoreline protections, all of that should be better informed because of the
science that’s contained in here.
But there are no big switches that we can throw on a daily or a monthly or
a yearly basis that’s going to give everybody what they would ideally like, which
is water levels without phragmites at the level of their docks. It’s not within our
control, even with the best science and engineering.
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Well, Commissioner Pollack, I think you really
summarized that very well. One thing I would add is – and something you often
do – is look at ice cover in the winter, because that we found has been decreasing,
particularly Lake Superior.
And so if you have a lack of ice cover and then you have cool or cold, dry
Canadian air coming across the border, and it’s just like a sponge, it will just take
that lake water up and then deposit it across the lake, and then when it comes to a
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land mass and rises and snows. But that’s a major factor affecting lake levels,
particularly in Superior.
And also, I think…I know there are folks who don’t believe in climate
change. I’m not one of them. I believe in it and I have for many years, as a result
of an Aspen Institute group that I was with many years ago.
But we’re in a period of uncertainty now, and I think it’s fair to say that
the engineer’s assumption of stationarity, that is everything repeats itself, is one
that we really have to be careful about, because I think we’re entering, in my
view, the possibility of a new set of factors affecting our weather, our climate, our
precipitation, our evaporation, our runoff here in the lakes.
One question I always used to ask students, and probably all of you know
this, that if you could follow, say, one drop of water deposited in Lake Superior,
how long would it take to go to the St. Mary’s River? Just…you know, it’s in
years…
LANA POLLACK:
From…the question is from Superior to the St.
Mary’s…
JONATHAN BULKLEY: River, yeah, you just (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: Just, just getting out of Lake Superior. St. Mary’s,
not down here.
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED: 45 (inaudible)...
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JONATHAN BULKLEY:
Hundreds, I’ve got hundreds!
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, I’ve got a hundred.
UNIDENTIFIED: Well, I said hundreds…
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Okay, that’s good, that’s even better. Two
hundred?
LANA POLLACK: Do you want to suggest two hundred? Is anybody
suggesting two hundred?
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Anybody else?
UNIDENTIFIED: A thousand!
JONATHAN BULKLEY: Oh, that’s a little bit too much. Roughly, if you
could follow that individual particle, about 300 years would be the median time
for it to flow out.
LANA POLLACK: And how long to get down to Grosse Pointe?
JONATHAN BULKLEY:
Well, Michigan-Huron, it comes into
Michigan-Huron, Michigan is about 125 years, Huron is less, maybe 40 years. So
the water that’s passing here now may have been around, goodness, I guess when
they were fighting the revolution or…
LANA POLLACK: Before, yeah.
JONATHAN BULKLEY: (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: That’s it. With all of that, now is there anybody else
that would like to…Kay, would like to come up and offer your impressions of
whatever…
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KAY FELT (U.S. Member, Public Interest Advisory Group, International
Upper Great Lakes Study): Of whatever. (LAUGHS) Well, I have a little bit to
say about whether this plan is better, but perhaps not in ways people anticipate.
UNIDENTIFIED: I’m sorry, but we can’t hear Kay…
LANA POLLACK: No, Kay is on her way to the mic. Kay is on her way
to the mic so that you can hear, or you will be able to hear.
KAY FELT: Okay, thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you.
KAY FELT: I was privileged to be on the Study Board for the first 3+
years of its operation, through the production of the first report, and I remained on
the Public Interest Advisory Group throughout the portion of the study, and I
really want to emphasize the importance of that group and the importance of
public participation.
And if I say nothing else tonight to try to persuade the commissioners, it
would be that I would want you to be sure that whatever is (inaudible)...by this
point and approved as informed recommendations to governments include very
robust public participation, because the public and the people who speak are on
the ground, in individual locations.
Regulators may, to some degree, they’re more local (?), they happen to be,
have their feet on the ground, but some of the national regulators, some of the
national scientists who came to talk to us had literally never been into the
locations that they were prognosticating about.
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And so it was having those 20 people from across the basin, who each had
an individual perspective and could bring their views to bear, it was an extremely
important part of this study.
Now the other thing that I want to say about the differences between this
plan and 77A are that I am pleased that this plan is not immediately
recommending any major changes. Any changes in flows bring uncertainty and
unanticipated consequences.
One of the things I think we have to recognize is that while we could stay,
it would be ideal to go back to conditions that existed 100 years ago. If we were
to go back to those conditions, we would find that the environment in which they
were reproduced is now very different, because there have been so many changes
over the years.
We still are having the phenomenon of a part of the basin continuing to
rise from the glaciers and another part of the basin, particularly the western side,
continuing to fall. And so everything that we might do to change the levels,
particularly of Michigan-Huron, could have a dramatic effect on the western side
of Michigan - our public interest people from that area were very concerned – and
on the whole western shore – Chicago, Milwaukee, Duluth, Duluth in particular,
highly at risk.
So we need to be really very careful about what we recommend on terms
of change and major change is not necessarily, in the form of this study, any
better.
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Now the other thing that would happen if we…and while I am certainly in
favour or have always been aware of things that we might do on a total basin
management level, I am not in favour of greater structures in any part of the
basin, and particularly not affecting the St. Clair River.
Certainly, anything we would do in the St. Clair River could have an
adverse effect on the western part of the basin in terms of the potential for
flooding, but it also, at least for a period of years, would dramatically lower the
levels of Lake St. Clair. And if any of you have ever lived with (inaudible), you
know that once phragmites get in there, they are almost impossible to get out.
And so we need to be very careful as to how we approach the adaptive
management concept, of which I am very supportive of, but I think we have to be
very careful how it is managed and approached.
One of the things that Jonathan referred to that was very frustrating at the
beginning part of the study is that we do these studies every 20 to 30 years, and
the first part of the study always has been consumed with trying to recreate the
data that was not preserved between studies. And so the weather stations, the
evaporation gauges, the water flow gauges that were put in are very important to
maintain.
And one of the things that I think people who have an influence over the
financial aspects of each of the governments need to emphasize is we must
maintain the money in our respective budgets from study to study to maintain that
information, because it just plain costs too much to have to reconstruct it every
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time we need it again. It’s wasteful to do anything other than to maintain this
information and its continued upkeep between studies.
Now adaptive management is very important, but different people
approach it process-wise, and I’m much more concerned about process than I am
about the concepts.
Different people approach it process-wise from the
standpoint of who is going to be involved in managing it.
We certainly need regulators from a wide range of agencies, we need
scientists from a wide range of agencies, but we absolutely need – and this is one
of the things that the Public Interest Advisory Group gets very adamant about –
we need a formalized process for public input, such as a continued Public Interest
Advisory Group or new Public Interest Group, such as the fact that my Canadian
counterpart and I…
I was actually the only true public member because I am not a scientist.
My Canadian counterpart is one of the world’s best-known meteorologists, in fact
(inaudible)...together the people who formed the IPCC. But he and I were both
adamant, as were the others in the Public Interest Advisory Group, about the
extreme importance of having the public formally involved, in a real way, in how
adaptive management is carried out process-wise.
Now…I made some notes and now I’m having a little trouble reading my
notes. Let’s see (inaudible)...upset when I take off my glasses. Some of the
things that I think are not as prominent in the report…in the video as they are in
the report are some of the benefits from the Lake Superior proposed…tentative…
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UNIDENTIFIED: (inaudible)...we’re back.
LANA POLLACK:
Okay, good, thank you.
Sorry, there was some
communication (inaudible).
KAY FELT: There are some very interesting things that can happen by
managing the flow, particularly…not necessarily its total level and amount, but
certainly from the time of day and the days of the week, helping our native
fishermen along the St. Mary's River. Also, increasing the potential to control
(inaudible). If we increase the flows at night, when the power plants don’t need it
(inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: I think you…the lampreys?
KAY FELT: The lampreys.
LANA POLLACK: The lampreys.
KAY FELT: Yeah, I’m sorry, the lampreys. That that is a very important
side benefit. And some of the benefits of this new plan are much more subtle
than I think were described in the video, and of course there are so many of them
that are in the report, and I do encourage you to read it.
I think one of the other things that I found very interesting this year is the
relationship between ice cover and differential temperature. When it was such a
mild winter, there was great fear that we were going to have huge drops in Lake
Superior water levels, and the interesting thing is that we did not have the degree
of drop that was feared because the temperature differential was not as great since
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the air temperature was closer than it often is in the winter to the water
temperature.
And I think all of that emphasizes the extreme complexity of all of this and
the need to keep our scientific ears very close to the ground as time goes on
because we really don’t know what the outcomes are going to be years from now.
And so I would just say that I think that there are a lot of small ways in
which 1977A is very helpful, that it certainly is not harmful, and that adaptive
management is a good thing if we have good public input, and that we need to
keep the financial dollars flowing to continue to collect the data that we’ve
always had to recreate between studies. I don’t know if that helps.
LANA POLLACK: Helped me.
RICH MOY: Thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Commissioner Comuzzi or Commissioner Knott, do
you have any comments or questions? Two Study Board members here and a
room full of smart people.
JOSEPH COMUZZI (Chairman, Canadian Section, International Joint
Commission): It’s all very interesting, thank you.
LYALL KNOTT (Commissioner, Canadian Section, International Joint
Commission): Thank you.
LANA POLLACK: All right, are there…Tim, Commissioner Killeen?
TIM KILLEEN (Wayne County Commissioner):
Thanks, Lana, and
commissioners of the IJC. I have not had a chance to review this. I did not put
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down on my comment card that I wanted to have comments, because I know how
specific it is, but I do want to make a few comments of a more global nature
about the (inaudible) Great Lakes.
In my past, I’ve been the political chair for the Sierra Club in the State of
Michigan, and my academic background is in biology and geology, so I very
appreciate the complexities that the IJC faces in managing natural systems that
we do not wholly understand.
And listening to the engineer, models are only good as your knowledge,
and we have incomplete knowledge here and incomplete data. And we are
dealing with…and so in my geology background, I think of time, and 109 years
of monthly data for a system that is measured more in millennia than it is in
months is a very difficult proposition. That’s why to hear Ms. Felt raise the issue
of glacial rebound and how that’s affecting and whether we can really factor that
and all of the other factors here…
So, and since we have heard also that we do have this incomplete
knowledge and we don’t know how things are going to be in 100-150 years, I
guess, to the Commission, then to the commissioners, what I would say is – and
I’m sure everybody has heard this a million times – if you start tinkering with
natural systems, then you’ve got to tinker to fix what you’ve tinkered with, and
then you’ve got to tinker again to fix what you tinkered with.
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And so I’m encouraging a conservative approach here by the IJC, not to
overregulate and not to make too many changes. I am glad to hear the changes in
the plan, from what I understand, are relatively modest changes.
But on a more global scale, I think one of the threats to the Great Lakes,
one of the biggest threats to the Great Lakes was the opening of the St. Lawrence
Seaway and access by the ocean (inaudible). I didn’t get a chance to ask here, but
there was a lot of talk about navigation and maintaining navigation for the lakes.
Is that for the sea boats? Is that (inaudible)...here?
LANA POLLACK: Well, the treaty under which the Commission exists is
explicit in that navigation is one – not the only one, but one – interest that needs
to be considered in balancing our management practices.
But we also consider recreational boating. We also consider, you know,
the full ecological spectrum. That was not explicit in the Treaty in 1909, but
today…
TIM KILLEEN: But discussion we’ve heard tonight, Lana, of navigation,
that’s for the deep draft freighters…
LANA POLLACK: When you hear that language, that is exactly right,
that’s referring to commercial, deep-draft cargo movement.
TIM KILLEEN: Actually, I have Great Lakes merchant marine in my
background also (inaudible)...freighters. So I would say there I would not mind
at all focusing on the St. Lawrence and all of the threats that that brings into the
Great Lakes.
And as a local elected official, I’ll vote for the economic
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development to put everything on the trains and run it through the Great Lakes
that way.
However, but this is an indication of just the complexity of what you’re
dealing with and the interests and the powerful interests that you’re dealing with.
Absolutely, everyone wants the shoreline to be the same year after year after year
after year, and that’s certainly not 100 per cent reasonable that that can be done.
So I appreciate the effort of the International Joint Commission and once
again, I would encourage that since we are operating in very complex systems,
with incomplete knowledge, that a conservative approach I think is the better
approach. So thank you for having me.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you, thank you very much.
UNIDENTIFIED: Can I just ask Mr. Killeen a question?
LANA POLLACK: Yes, you can ask him the question and I am going to
repeat it on the mic so that you don’t have to get up and they can hear.
UNIDENTIFIED: I just wondered if he’s checked at the map and noticed
that if we put everything on a train, it would probably come down past Chicago
and bypass Detroit (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: Oh, the question is about the routing of the trains and
where that would go and what the impact would be on the impacts of this region,
and that was a question for Mr. Killeen.
TIM KILLEEN: Exactly, and to that, I’d say you’re asking a political…to
make a political statement there.
I think it’s the strength of the relative
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delegations from the states and Washington to determine where those train tracks
go, so…
But yeah, again, I just think that that has done so much damage to the
Great Lakes, the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. It’s just done enormous
damage. What are we down to, like, 20 per cent of our species in the lakes now,
our native species, and 80 per cent are not, and that’s just caused tremendous
problems.
LANA POLLACK: It’s a separate issue that…
TIM KILLEEN: It’s a separate issue (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: …is somewhat beyond the scope of this particular
study. However, I will say that the IJC has been involved with a collaborative
effort with many interests, includes navigation, includes environmentalists,
includes all of the states and the provinces, on the ballast water issue. So that
falls a little short of your suggestion to close the Seaway, but it does address the
issue associated with that.
TIM KILLEEN: Well, since there were commissioners here and around
the country, I wanted to take the opportunity to (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK:
Okay, thank you very much.
We welcome all
comments.
TIM KILLEEN: Thank you.
LANA POLLACK:
Indeed, we welcome your comments.
anybody else? Yes, Ma’am?
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Is there
TINA REILLY-HUMPHREY:
Good evening, commissioners, public
officials. My name is Tina Reilly-Humphrey. I am a writer with (inaudible)
Detroit.com, we are the amazon (?) (inaudible).
LANA POLLACK: Speak really into that mic so they can hear you all the
way out in Vancouver.
TINA REILLY-HUMPHREY: All right. I was saying we are the amazon
green (?). If and when the recommendations are put in place, can you speak to
whether or not there are some implications for jobs and careers along the
waterbase, small business opportunities either, I guess, directly or indirectly, in
working through or with other partners like the EPA or the GLRC and those kinds
of things?
LANA POLLACK: Well, I may turn also to the members of the Study
Board, but I can say indeed that the economics of all of these different elements
were indeed considered or are indeed considered important.
So we know that there are economic impacts of shipping but there are
equally important economic impacts of protecting the environment or allowing
the environment to be denigrated or dismissed or…
So indeed, I think the effort to work towards as much stability in a very
uncertain world is very much supportive of economic health and development.
One thing that the economy does poorly is respond to surprises and uncertainties.
Although we recognize in this report that there’s a great deal of
uncertainty, the encouragement of adaptive management is consistent with your
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concerns, that is to say let’s look at what we know, let’s be prepared for it, let’s
make our investments so that they’re smart, consistent with what we can
anticipate, and so that the damage and changing environment will be minimized
and the opportunities maximized.
TINA REILLY-HUMPHREY: Thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you. Do we have anybody else who would
like to speak?
BOBBIE FILENDA: Uh, yes.
LANA POLLACK: Yes? Thank you.
BOBBIE FILENDA: Hi, my name is Bobbie Filenda (?) and I am from
Port Huron. And I just have a question on something I just read in this release
from March 28th (inaudible) tonight. I heard that putting restored structures in the
St. Clair River might be helpful, but in here it says they’d result in adverse effects
and I’d just like to know what those might be?
LANA POLLACK: Well, this will not be a comprehensive answer, and I
encourage you very much to go to the website and get fully informed, but there
are many environmental questions associated with it. The first one that comes to
mind is the loss of sturgeon habitat.
But beyond that, Ms. Felt said that if you are raising the water, at least on a
temporary basis, if you are building these things to raise the water behind or
uplake of these structures, you’re going to lower (?) them, at least temporarily, in
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Lake St. Clair, and lower lake levels in Lake St. Clair are generally considered
undesirable.
But for the real answers, I really encourage you to read the report. And if
anybody here, either staff or Board members or commissioners would like to add
to that answer, I’d be happy to hear from you. Go ahead, come to the mic, sure.
Oh wait, just a second.
BOBBIE FILENDA: I’m sorry.
LANA POLLACK: No, just hang on, don’t go away. We’re going to hear
from, I think, Paul Pilon in Ottawa, who is a scientist who is staff to this Board.
So we’ll hear from him and then we’ll go back to you. Go ahead, Paul.
PAUL PILON (Engineering Advisor, Canadian Section, International Joint
Commission):
Hi, it’s Paul Pilon, in Ottawa, Canadian Section Engineering
Advisor. Some of the…the place to start would be to refer to the report, as Chair
Pollack has mentioned.
But as Kay Felt had pointed out, I believe, in her comments, there are a
number of impacts, and one is the potential lowering of water levels immediately
downstream, say if a structure was placed in the St. Clair River. So Lake Erie
would have, for example, lower water levels in downstream, through the St.
Lawrence, would result in lower water levels and water available because it
would be raising the waters of Lake Michigan-Huron, for example.
And if you’re raising the Lake Michigan-Huron, you then could potentially
be flooding, as was mentioned, the western portion of Michigan, while the eastern
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portion of Lake Huron would be rising. So there’s consequences on water levels
upstream.
As well, one thing that was found in one of the environmental workshops
was that a lot of the area of the St. Clair River, particularly where they were
looking at potential structures, are an excellent spawning location for lake
sturgeon, which are an endangered species, and so there would be environmental
consequences that would have to be seriously considered if something like this
were going forward. And I believe that was also summarized in the report. But
those are some of the immediate consequences that come to mind.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you, Paul.
PAUL PILON: Thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you very much.
BOBBIE FILENDA: Yes, thank you, I will read the report. One other
thing I did hear was that by putting these structures in the river, it would decrease
the flow rate, and I’m not sure just…
LANA POLLACK: Paul, would you like to comment on that?
PAUL PILON: Yes, thank you. That’s what I was referring to, in terms of
Lake Erie would immediately start to have less water arriving, because if you
have built a structure and the intent was to increase the upstream water level,
you’re storing the water, not allowing as much water as would naturally have
flowed out of Lake Michigan-Huron to go downstream.
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So you would be
decreasing Lake Erie levels and flows down the Detroit River as well and further
downstream as well.
If you put in structures as well and if you are trying to more tightly
regulate them, the other consequence is that you may have to increase the
discharge capacity of the rivers so that if some very large event is happening and
you’re not wishing to flood upstream, you’re wanting to evacuate the water, so
you might actually be exceeding the previous discharges that were there.
So there’s all kinds of complications that would have to be analyzed in a
feasibility study that would be more in depth than what the actual study had
looked at, to assess the various aspects and consequences. Thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you. Are there other comments or questions?
Yes, Sir?
UNIDENTIFIED: In this adaptive program, I’m curious, right now there
is, under 77A, how is the controlling done? Is there a group that monitors this
and reacts to changes?
LANA POLLACK: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED: And that’ll continue with the new plan?
LANA POLLACK: Paul, do you want to explain the structure of the
current board?
PAUL PILON: Yes, thank you. Currently there is a Lake Superior Board
of Control and they oversee the situation on a constant basis on Lake Superior
and downstream.
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And as well, I believe there is a recommendation from the Study Board
that an advisory board on water levels also be fashioned or created to help
coordinate information on the Great Lakes and oversee adaptive management,
etc., and that’s mentioned in the report.
So in essence, the way the regulation plan works is it tends to be very
automatic. It knows what the levels are, it knows what the flows are, etc., and it
basically signals what the releases should be from Lake Superior, and those are
set on a monthly basis.
And if, for whatever reason, emergency conditions would arise, for
example an electrical failure, a blackout that had happened, for example, in
portions of the basin some years ago, the Commission has given emergency
management to that board to make rapid changes so that there isn’t a bureaucracy
stepping in between what needs to be done and the people who know what needs
to happen. So that is in there.
One thing that isn’t being recommended is what they termed discretionary
authority, which means that the Board can decide to do what it wishes to do as
time goes by.
Such authority has been given to the…excuse me, the International St.
Lawrence Board of Control for the management of Lake Ontario, but that is a
different situation in Lake Ontario in terms of how rapidly things can change and
how they may have to make deviations due to those changes to offset how the
plan works.
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So in Lake Superior, things, I would say - and you had asked an earlier
question in terms of what’s different with the new plan – by and large, there is
very little difference to an observer watching the levels of Lake Superior.
The big differences will come when there is a drought that is worse than
any drought that we’ve actually seen in our recorded history on Lake Superior,
and what that will do is raise water levels higher in Lake Superior than would
have occurred during the operation of Plan 1977A as well. So that’s one of the
big changes.
The other changes that will be occurring, they’re asking for more moderate
changes to the gate (?) structures at the Sault so that they don’t change as rapidly
as currently occurs with the existing plan. That is also creating a plan that is
more natural, that more mimics what the natural flows should be within the
system.
Environmentalists tend to appreciate natural flow conditions rather than
regulated flow conditions for the environment, although the study I don’t think
had found any environmental benefits or it hadn’t turned up environmental
benefits on that regard. But they know that usually, the consequences on the
environment are positive.
So those are some of the features of the new plan. And as someone who
was working on it had said, that if you actually were sitting on the shore of Lake
Superior, in all likelihood, you would never see or be able to say that this is the
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new plan versus the old plan. It basically is following things very, very similarly,
except when the extremes happen.
UNIDENTIFIED:
This, the oversee board, is this a mixture of both
Canadians and Americans that are participating?
LANA POLLACK: Yes, everything we do. Paul Pilon is our Canadian
engineering advisor and we have Mark Colosimo. We are joined at the hip and
binational all the way.
UNIDENTIFIED: Thank you, thank you so much.
PAUL PILON: I was going to ask if Mark wanted to add comments to
that (inaudible)...
LANA POLLACK: Mark, did you want to…he is shaking his head and
saying no, Paul. You guys have discussed this enough that you tend to give the
same answers, which I think is a good thing. Is there any other question or
comment that you would like to offer this evening? Yes, Kay Felt.
KAY FELT: You might just tell them that you are going to be on Great
Lakes Log the week after next…
LANA POLLACK: Oh, yes.
KAY FELT: And (inaudible)...
LYALL KNOTT: Could you repeat that please?
LANA POLLACK: Ms. Kay Felt is saying that…I was interviewed in the
local community cable program and it’s going to be on the week after next…
KAY FELT: Great Lakes Log.
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LANA POLLACK: Great Lakes Log, for people who are local to this
region.
I don’t think that gets all the way to Vancouver, but it should.
(LAUGHS) Lyall Knott, you’re missing out there. But for people who are local,
there is a further discussion of this the week after next.
Once again, let me just…let me thank the very competent staff. Let me
give special thanks to the two board members who we’re fortunate to have here
this evening. It’s a special treat that won’t happen at any of the other meetings.
And let me thank and ask my colleague here if he has anything he would
like to add, Rich Moy.
RICH MOY: I really don’t. I think everything was covered quite clearly.
And I think it’s been said over and over that this new plan is very close to the
1977 plan except for extreme drought conditions, then it tries to mimic the natural
hydrograph more than the existing plan does, and those are clearly benefits.
When you mimic the natural hydrograph, there is a clear benefit for hydro
power production and for navigational interests, because they have better
information in front of them for making decisions.
And besides that, I think everything has been very clearly stated, and I
thank you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you. Lyall Knott, Commissioner Knott?
LYALL KNOTT: I’d just like to echo your comments, Lana, on the work
of the board and to thank them very much for their service not only to their
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country, but their binational service and the service to the Great Lakes. Thank
you.
LANA POLLACK: Thank you. And Chair Comuzzi, would you like the
last word?
JOSEPH COMUZZI:
No, I agree with everything that’s been said.
(LAUGHS)
LANA POLLACK: All right…wait, wait, one more last word is going to
the man from Montana.
RICH MOY: There’s one more comment, and it was made clear that this
was a $20 million, five-year study that (inaudible)...enormous amount of data that
was collected, and it’s been made really clear that we need to make sure we
preserve this database and if we collect additional monitoring data to add onto it
for adaptive management, and that’s something that governments need to hear.
Because when you try to go back, 25-30 years from now, and reconstitute this
database, it’s going to be extremely expensive.
And so one of the things the International Joint Commission would love to
do is to make sure that we can maintain the continuity of this data that’s already
been gathered and been standardized across both jurisdictions or all jurisdictions
and then be able to continue into the future.
LANA POLLACK:
And I would just like to say thank you, and in
addition say that if $20 million sounds like a high figure, it’s because it is a lot of
money. However, if you think of the 45 million people who depend on the Great
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Lakes, the number of us who live in very close proximity of the lakes, the number
of people whose livelihood depends on being able to live in harmony with those
lakes, and then if you consider that there is a great deal of new understanding that
will be helpful as we face climate change uncertainties, if we treat this
information respectfully and if we, at all levels of government and in our personal
commercial decisions, make them in light of this new information, then it’s a
bargain, it’s a bargain.
So we encourage you to go to this report for specific things that are of
interest to you, in your lives, and to know that this report will remain up in years
to come. Whatever decisions we make, the science and the information will be
important to all of us. So once again, thank you all. (APPLAUSE)
*****
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