By Josh Usmani
This year, Memorial Day weekend marked the opening of the first full season of Northeast Ohio’s beaches under the management of Cleveland Metroparks. While we’re as excited as anyone about the prospect of a day at the beach (especially after this past winter-from-hell), our lake still has major issues that need to be addressed moving forward.
Last June, Ohio Governor John Kasich and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson transferred control of 455 acres of beachfront property – including various marinas, yacht clubs and parks – to the Cleveland Metroparks. The city maintains ownership of the land, and Cleveland Metroparks will lease the properties for $1 a year during their 99-year lease.
This year also marks changes to the monitoring of water quality at area beaches. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) recently unveiled their new Nowcast water quality testing equipment. Previously, test results required 24 hours of turnaround. Nowcast will reduce turnaround to just 3-4 hours. These timely reports will be posted at each of the area’s beaches by 9:30am every day to inform potential swimmers of any possible dangers.
Variables in water quality include pollutants like raw sewage being discharged by area sewers, storm runoff (rainwater including motor oil, garbage, etc.), presence of waterfowl around the beach, lake currents and more.
The US Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) considers Cleveland in violation of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Currently, about 4.5 billion gallons of Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) dump raw sewage into our local water supply. Despite this staggering statistic, Cleveland is making progress – in the ’70s, raw sewage discharge was as high as 9 billion gallons annually.
In an ongoing effort to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act, the NEORSD is implementing Project Green Lake. The project hopes to cut CSOs to “just” 494 million gallons by 2035. The 20-30 year project is estimated to cost around $3 billion. However, officials from the NEORSD claim the project will generate 31,000 jobs, $3 billion in labor income and $443 million in tax revenue throughout 7 counties in Northeast Ohio.
As with any government intervention/regulation, the results aren’t cheap. NEORSD’s 2012-2016 rate schedule includes a 13% annual rate increase in your bill – 4% of which is due to Project Green Lake.
Local farmers will also have more red tape with the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 150 – which will impose regulation on the use and commerce of fertilizers in commercial farming. The bill, which unanimously passed both the State House and Senate, is being called a good “first step.” However, experts agree that the bill doesn’t address many other contributors to the lake’s excessive phosphorous and nitrogen problems (which has led to a toxic green algae crisis in the lake).
While the bill doesn’t directly address these contributors, local farmers and agencies are working together to collect more data for further analysis.
We certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from enjoying the beach and/or lake, but we hope you’ll be a bit more conscious of your water usage in general this summer.
And, before you go, check the water quality reports on Twitter.
Josh Usmani is a 27 year old local artist, curator and writer. Since 2008, his work has been featured in over 50 local and regional exhibitions.
2 Responses to “Cleveland Beaches are Cleaning Up”
bob
LOT of this is Yup chasing thing combined with biz crew chasing convention biz…..KEEP it SANE,legal,etc. SURE kiddies STILL go down at ODD times to party,etc.til some ranger shows up and lays down Law and God to em…. FINALLY off to some corner lot ,etc.etc.
bob
WHO is gonna stand there and say should poison selves with own sewage thou $3 BILLION figure is hideous… 31K jobs? SOMEONE IS SMOKING the sewage or drinkin the literal KoozAid….