A federal district judge is allowing the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to join a Lake Erie pollution lawsuit as a defendant.
The motion by the agency to join the lawsuit was not opposed by the plaintiffs: the Board of Lucas County Commissioners, the City of Toledo, and the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
The lawsuit alleges that a phosphorus control plan by the Ohio EPA and U.S Environmental Protection Agency is defective. Phosphorus encourages cyanobacterial blooms to grow in Lake Erie.
Sandy Bihn is the head of Lake Erie Waterkeeper, a watchdog group that monitors sources of phosphorus getting into the Great Lake. Bihn said the EPA agencies' phosphorus control plan doesn't address all the forms of phosphorus that get into the lake.
In particular, she said the plan virtually ignores the role of phosphorus in manure from cows. Bihn said the plan still focuses primarily on the phosphorus in chemical fertilizers used by Ohio crop agriculture farmers.
"Lake Erie will never recover [under the current system]," Bihn said. "Because Ohio EPA and U.S. EPA have allowed vast amounts of manure from confined animal operations to go onto the ground near the barns, and it runs off into field tiles, into ditches, into streams, and into the lakes," Bihn said.
Bihn said Ohio does not properly regulate the number of cattle allowed in the Maumee River watershed, which is now saturated with manure, and she said confined animal feed operations (CAFOs) are not required to treat the manure to remove phosphorus to prevent it from flowing into the lake.
Bihn alleges the loose regulation of CAFOs by both the Ohio EPA and U.S EPA is due to the outsized political influence of the meat and dairy industry, which relies on the CAFO system to make meat and meat products inexpensive in the U.S.
Spokespersons for the Ohio EPA and U.S. EPA said they could not comment on pending litigation.
