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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Thursday, August 14th, and I'm Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells, CEO of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

Thank you very much.

We are honored to serve as partners on today's forum and introduce the 2025 state of the Great Lakes.

For over 50 years, the sewer district has protected our region's freshwater resources by treating wastewater, reducing combined sewer overflows, and addressing flooding, erosion and water quality problems with our regional stormwater management program.

These efforts improve and protect the health of Lake Erie, the source of drinking water for millions, an invaluable ecological resource and economic driver for our region.

This year's state of the Great Lakes comes as across the country we are seeing wetter, warmer, wilder weather.

Everybody's got to know it.

For the millions of people, businesses and communities who call the Great Lakes regions home.

The questions are urgent.

How will this impact our lakes?

What's next and what more can we do?

The Ohio State University Stone lab, Ohio Sea grants, education and outreach facility on Lake Erie is leading the way in addressing these and many other questions.

Their work provides the data and insight that inform policy, guide environmental management, and deepen public understanding of our Great Lakes.

Our speaker today, Doctor Chris Winslow, serves as director of the Ohio Sea Grant College Program and coordinates its research with Stone lab.

Doctor Winslow holds a bachelor's degree from Ohio University and a Ph.D.

from Bowling Green State University, where he studied the impact of invasive species on smallmouth bass in Lake Erie.

Chris brings his research experience and wealth of knowledge to the Ohio Sea grant and Stone lab, where over 100 where for over 100 years, scientists have tackled the lake's most pressing issues while studying ecosystem health, economic impacts and community resilience.

This spring, Chris was recognized as the large Lake Champion by the International Association of Great Lakes Research for his ability to convene scientists, policymakers, and community members to build the partnerships that are essential for protecting our lakes.

From his research in formation of the Lake Erie and Aquatic Research Network to the development of the Ohio Wetland Monitoring Program, he has created opportunities for collaboration as we step up to face the challenges threatening our Great Lakes.

And he's going to tell us all about it today.

I remain a reminder for our live stream audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

So now friends and members of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Doctor Chris Winslow.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Oh, jeez.

I hate when the starts with applause because, like, the bar is there, right?

So now we got a problem.

If I drop the ball here, and I just started writing my parents to these things because I don't think they know that I've actually graduated, accomplished anything yet.

So it's like, this is huge for me.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

I do wonder, so I hope this isn't a problem for folks.

So thank you for this.

And before I dive into some of the, you know, the issues that I want to highlight that are on our Great Lakes and more specifically, Lake Erie.

I really want to just kind of give you the punchline at the beginning, and some of it's already been hit on today by the great introductions that we've had.

So I'm going to give you five things.

And if you forget the issues that I highlight or the nuances of those issues, I want you to remember five things if you can, and they'll come up over and over again.

But the first thing I want to tell you is that there is no difference between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.

And so as long as we can keep that in mind, that any investment in the protection and restoration of this lake will pay itself back for us.

So don't forget that no difference between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.

The second thing, which is clearly been highlighted here today is partnerships, collaborations, partnerships, collaborations.

Right.

This is a great lake, not a very good lake, not an okay lake.

This thing is huge.

And there's five of them, right?

We heard those numbers.

20% of the world's freshwater surface freshwater is here, right?

So not one academic institution, not one business, not one NGO, not one federal or state agency is going to solve this problem.

And so collaborations and partnerships are the absolute key here.

The next thing, the third thing I want you to think of is innovation.

Right.

The science we do today and the monitoring of that lake and these lakes that we do is not going to be the science that we're doing a year from now, or the monitoring we're going to be doing a year from now.

So we have to think about how we address the issues in this lake, how we solve those issues through a new lens and using new tools.

And I see it when I look over here at the Cleveland Water Alliance, I know that that team that's sitting at one of those sponsor tables is in this space.

How do we accelerate innovation on Lake Erie and beyond?

Okay.

So that's the third, right?

You cannot manage what we don't measure, right.

If we are the stewards of this lake, all five Great Lakes, you can't manage that resource unless you monitor it.

And you understand the science.

That's out there okay.

And so I bring this up because we I hear not often but often enough.

Haven't we studied that enough.

Like can we just say it's solved and done.

Am I answer that as every research project I've done or been associated with, I actually come up with more questions post answering the one I set out to do.

So we are not done monitoring.

We are not done doing the science because then we will not be able to manage this resource.

Okay.

And last but not least, I'm just going to say the word broader.

What I mean by broader is we are at a time right now, and I'm thankful for this, is that we are not just doing science for science sake anymore.

Right?

When I sit on review panels for grants, or I propose a project to do, I know it's not going to be evaluated just on the science because we need to have broader participation, those partnerships and collaborations that I mentioned earlier.

But as important, if not more important, the people that live along these lakes need to be engaged in.

Why are you doing that?

Science?

Why should I care?

And why is it important?

So when I say broader as my fifth point, broader participation on the front end of the work that we do, but I also want to say broader impacts because science done by a bunch of nerds, writing nerd articles and going to nerd conferences is not going to move the needle for this lick.

Okay?

And I am one of those nerds, right?

You heard.

I don't even know what a smallmouth bass is anymore.

But that's what I apparently did for my PhD.

But what I'm trying to say for you is that the science cannot happen in a vacuum.

Yes, we need peer review, and yes, we need conferences because that's the way we academics verify the work we're doing.

That's how we show through that period proof hostis that this is vetted in good stuff.

But if we do not translate that science that the nerds are talking about to people that can use that information, we have dropped the ball.

Okay.

So hold on to those five things for us today.

No different 12 economy and a healthy environment, right?

We need to know that partnerships are absolutely key.

We can't manage what we don't measure and study.

We need to know these broader impacts.

Okay.

So those are the things that I want you to hold and keep with you.

Okay.

So now we're going to go into some of these, you know, the state of the Great Lakes.

That's what we're here for today.

I'm sorry folks from Cleveland.

You're probably sick of seeing the Lake River catch on fire.

But what I'm here, here to show you, is talk to you about is that we do have some ills of the past that we're still working on.

Okay.

But now what we're facing with is not only do we have to address these ills of the past, which things like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and things like that are helping us address, but we need to be able to forecast those problems of the future.

What isn't on our radar right now?

Now, I do put this up here because before I dive into the issues and at a high level, I really want questions coming from all of you.

Before we dive into these, I do want to show that this was, you know, the burning of the Cuyahoga River.

Not good.

Typically a bad sign when water catches on fire really did stimulate the EPA.

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in the Clean Water Act.

And so we need to think about our history as we move, move forward, not putting words on these slides, because I know that, you know, this will be recorded.

But this picture reminds me that I've got to tell you about nutrient loading and Habs in the Great Lakes.

It is not just Lake Erie.

It's not just the western Lake Erie basin.

This is in Saginaw Bay.

This is in green Bay.

We're even seeing these blooms show up in Duluth.

And so I'm here to tell you, as we know, the solution for the western basin of Lake Erie.

And it's a 40% reduction in these nutrients relative to 2008.

Don't remember those numbers.

There won't be a quiz, but we need to reduce our nutrients driving these blooms by 40%.

Okay.

I'm happy to report after the Toledo Drinking Water Advisory, sea Grant and Stone lab and many of our partners, including the Ohio Department of Higher Education and the University of Toledo, have been managing about 2 to $2.5 million a year to address this nutrient issue.

And as we do that, we look at this through four lenses.

The first lens is, what is this bloom?

Why is it here?

Why is it producing toxins?

When does it start and end?

When it starts.

Okay.

Kind of basic chemistry.

Biology questions.

The second thing we look at is water treatment.

These blooms.

It's going to be a heavy lift.

To find the solution, we need to make sure that people, those 11 to 13 million people that use Lake Erie for drinking water, are confident that they can turn on their faucet.

So we're funding research into clean drinking water.

The third thing is what are the human impacts of these toxins?

If we get exposed to them, right.

Hopefully not through drinking water based on the previous research.

But we do have folks that recreate on these lakes, and we need to make sure that if they're exposed, what might be the human impact.

And then the fourth bin that we look at is nutrient reduction that is driving these blooms.

You might say, why aren't you just doing that anyway and not worry about the other ones is because that lift is going to be a heavy lift and it's going to be again, everybody in here, all hands on deck.

Partners and collaborations.

We know where those nutrients are coming from.

We know, for example, at the mouth of the Maumee, which drives a lot of these, actually drives the harmful algal blooms in the western basin that about 8 to 9% is coming from wastewater treatment plants.

Through that process, they're not dropping the ball.

They're reducing their nutrients where they need to.

But that is part of the source.

We do know that failing septic systems are contributing some of those nutrients, about 4% of those nutrients.

We know that sometimes combined sewer overflows can contribute to those nutrients.

But what we found through all of our research through the years is that the bulk of that is coming from runoff from the landscape, what we call non-point source pollution.

In the western Lake Erie basin, about 73% of the acres are dedicated to agriculture.

And so that is where the lion's share of these nutrients are coming from.

I do not bring that up for you today to point a finger at farmers or producers.

It is just the reality of what we are doing on the landscape in this part of the country and in our Great Lakes.

And so we're working with those farmers, and I'm sure it'll come up in some of the questions.

What tools and techniques, what things might we want to incentivize farmers to do that will help us avoid this excess nutrients and these harmful algal blooms.

So the next one I want to go into, and it's not in any particular order, but we do have a dredging job to do in the Great Lakes and in Lake Erie specifically, we pull about one point 5,000,000yd of sediment out of eight navigable channels.

Every year, every year.

Okay.

And so what do we do with those dredge spoils?

And we actually have former EPA Director Craig Butler in the room.

I see here a lot of this initiative was actually taken on under his leadership.

We we, stopped the open lake to sort of dredge this, dredge material in 2020, I believe.

Director Butler.

There we go.

Look at.

I got a number.

Right.

So 2020.

And so basically with that, we've got to figure out if we're not going to let this open lake disposal happen.

What are we going to do with that material?

And we stopped calling it waste number one.

We started talking about it as a resource of of material.

And so I would tell you that we still have this to face.

That's a lot of material we have to move out of those eight channels.

And there are more than eight that are dredged.

But these are the eight major ones.

We've got to figure out what to do with that.

And what you're seeing, on the slide for those in your audience, you're seeing that we're trying to grow crops on that.

So how can we move that sediment back on to our agricultural fields?

Can we construct wetlands with that?

Can we actually harvest that sediment and sell it on the market, or build construction materials out of it?

So the dredging is something we will face, but I'm happy to see that we're doing things to move that in the right direction.

The next one see if it moves up this slide.

Again, for those of you are just seeing the recording and not much, this is just a gaggle of critters that live in, Lake Erie.

What you're seeing on the top are the two sport fish that are sought after by many of the anglers that come to Lake Erie.

So walleye on the top left in the yellow perch on the right.

When I get to drive from Columbus up to Stone lab when the ice is out, most of those cars in the parking lot are from North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia.

They are coming to Ohio to Lake Erie to catch those fish.

Again, no difference between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.

Remember that one.

But the other cast of characters that are up here and I can highlight a few.

We do have a lot of organisms that are not supposed to be here.

And first, I want to clear up for those in the audience.

We always call these invasive species.

That is actually a type.

We have a lot of organisms in the Great Lakes that are non-native, meaning they're not supposed to be here.

Evolutionary.

They have not been here.

Okay.

But not all of those get here and then wreak havoc.

That's when we toggle it from non-native to invasive.

Most of those that you're seeing on the screen are invasive species.

And happy to report we are seeing what looks like, a closing of that transport of these organisms in here.

If you're familiar with the shipping industry and we've got some of those partners in the room right now, we have things on ballast water exchange and if not bilge water exchange while moving across the Atlantic, we can filter the water coming off of those ballast.

And so we're working hard not to introduce any more.

Last number I saw we have about 200 non-natives in the Great Lakes.

So we don't need any we don't need any more.

We're happy with the number we have.

Right.

We're unhappy with the number we have right now.

Let's not add to it.

But I will say some of the things that you're seeing up here.

Many of you are probably hearing about Asian carp or invasive carp.

Sorry.

Invasive carp.

Most of you think, oh, yeah, that's the one coming up the Mississippi and going to enter through the Chicago Sanitary Shipping Canal.

Well, your agencies in this state, specifically the DNR, have actually found out there are routes through which that species could get into Lake Erie because of the Ohio River and the Ohio River basin.

And so your agencies have found four tributaries, or in some instances, canals, we built during the canal days that are actually routes where you could go from a invasive carp in the Ohio River into Lake Erie.

And thankfully, we mobilized on those.

And so we have actually through earthen, dammed and other structures, separated those two water bodies.

And, in the bottom right hand corner, again, those of you that are just hearing the audio, we have things called fish hook water fleas or spiny water fleas.

These are also in the lake.

We're paying attention to these because they're out competing some of our native what are called plankton or zooplankton, but also because they seem to be changing the diet in the foraging of some of our native fish.

You talk to a lot of captains right now, and they catch a yellow perch.

They will regurgitate these critters.

Sorry, I know you're eating.

Sorry, I didn't think that through.

But they will regurgitate these organisms, and you can talk to anglers saying they're just not biting.

They're not biting.

What's because they're chock full of these things?

Also, they're eating these things that are located in the water column in a different place than where we're angling our fish from.

So we had a little learning curve to do in here.

You're seeing the round goby pictures up here.

Everybody knows what a zebra mussel probably is.

They're here.

Not going anywhere.

But I would report that all the data I see.

And when I'm out in the field, which is fewer and fewer days every year, it's really sad.

But the numbers seem to be coming down.

But this is what we see in some of these invasions.

These organisms come in.

They're able to reproduce and grow unchecked.

They're off the charts as far as population.

And then eventually that will come down and level out at some kind of new, new normal.

Thankfully, we're trying to slow again the introduction of these organisms, because once we find that new normal or historically we'd find that new normal community, we'd introduce something else.

And then we got to reinvent the game again and figure out how the lakes balance out.

So these are still on our radar, but I can tell you, we're doing a lot to mitigate the impacts of these things.

And even identifying the characteristics of those organisms that, if brought here, makes them successful and making sure we target, through kind of, formulas and models on which the next organism might be.

And to build an early warning system for that transport.

Sorry, I had to put a graph in here.

It's required.

Once you get a PhD, you have to put at least one graph in every PowerPoint.

So it's here.

This is to remind me to tell you about the dead zone, and also to remind me to tell you that I hate the phrase dead zone.

Why?

Why did we call it that?

It's just so scary, right?

And ominous.

What the dead zone is, is basically the bottom of Lake Erie.

We'll go without oxygen.

The scientific term for that is anoxia.

If it's really low oxygen, it's called hypoxia.

So we got these fancy words to describe it.

But the punchline is during the summer, the bottom of the lake will go without oxygen.

It will become, quote unquote, dead.

Okay.

This has actually always occurred in Lake Erie.

From all the records, we can look at the shape of the lake.

And just physics have said that this has always probably happened, but it's happening earlier now and it's getting larger in size.

So how does this happen?

Right.

Well, during the summer when it occurs, the water at the top is very hot in the lake and the water at depth is kind of cold.

That means the water at the top is physically separated from the water at the bottom.

Because of density phenomenon.

So at the top that water mixing, photosynthesis analogy happening there and all of us from third grade remember that photosynthesis produces oxygen.

So the top of that lake has a lot of oxygen that organisms can live.

The bottom.

Once that separation happens in summer, the bottom doesn't produce any oxygen because the light doesn't make it that far for photosynthesis.

So the critters that live at the bottom are consuming that oxygen, and nothing's putting it back in again.

And that has always happened through the history of this lake.

The problem now is because we're growing so much more algae and things like that.

Those things now eventually die and sink to the bottom.

And so there's more to decompose and break down.

There's more oxygen sucked out of the bottom without putting new oxygen in through photosynthesis.

So I bring this up because Cleveland is well aware of this.

You will see a change in the color of your water.

Occasionally you will see something or smell water differently, and you will see dead fish washing up on the beach.

Again, this has always happened, right?

But what happens if you've seen the picture?

That blue color on the bottom of that graph reminds me to tell you, is normally that dead water or that anoxic water is removed from our water intake pipes and removed from where the fish are hanging out and swimming.

But if you get the right wind or the white wave, that water that was at the bottom rocks up to the intake pipes, or happy little fish swimming along the beach, that water surrounds that fish and they suffocate.

Okay.

So when you see the dead fish, never something we want to see.

When you see the water change a different color.

And our water treatment plant operators are scrambling.

They know how to remove that color.

They know how to get that color out.

It's just it's a race of time.

Okay.

But that's what we're trying to do is to educate folks that this is natural.

It's just exaggerated for us because of how biologically rich the lake is.

But great stuff going on here.

I'm actually happy to be a coauthor on a NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Also with the PFD comes acronyms.

We have to use them all time required.

There's a handshake.

I'll show you later, too.

There's a crazy handshake we have later, but so NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a lab in Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab.

They have built a model that says the chance of you having a hypoxic event or dead zone event elevates when you have wind coming from X direction or Y direction.

And it has to be at this speed in this kind of wave height.

So we're trying to give the communities that live along the lake kind of heads up that this might be, might be coming.

Okay.

Oh, in the picture on the left.

Sorry for those that aren't seeing all the pictures.

That looks gross and disgusting.

A car covered by insects.

But we scientists love that.

Not because we just have a sixth sense of humor, but also because that means those critters that live on the bottom are truly living.

They're alive, right?

They're not wiped out by Mercury or lead or dead zones.

Anoxia.

So when we see a hatch like this, that's a smile on our face.

A buggy lake is a healthy lake, and this is a tremendously good thing to see.

Not for the owner of that car.

That's a little unfortunate.

You're going to take more than a couple quarters to wash that out at the, at the, at the car wash station.

So that's dead zone.

And I wanted to make sure that was on your, on your radars.

Sorry for the pause.

No, there's another graph because I'm just the kind of PhD student that just pushes it further.

Right.

So this another graph has to be in a PowerPoint.

So what that is, is just showing you is water levels in Lake Erie and Lake Erie only.

You can get this data, from the Army Corps of Engineers for all five of the Great Lakes.

But the reason why I show you it for those that are sitting here, the blue line is the long term running average, and the red line is where that water level was.

For those of you that this is being recorded in May, not see that slide as well as us in the audience.

We have had a long history of being above that long term running average.

You cannot see it on this graph, but the high water marks basically June, July, August and September were all set in 2019 and 2020.

Not too long ago, folks, right.

We were plus three feet higher than the long term running average in 2019 and 2020.

Okay.

And so we have to think about how do we behave and interact in this lake when it is this way.

Right.

A lot of people will say, well, let's harden our shorelines.

Let's put concrete and rock in there and let's protect our shorelines.

Well, all the fish science that we do says we need natural shorelines for those fishers, right?

So how do we balance that healthy ecosystem, that naturally function functioning ecosystem with one that we want to live in, that just stays at the same height and doesn't move at all and has no waves.

Right.

So we've got to take take a step back and look at as the conditions in the lake, which are projected to see about 11% increase in precipitation and in an overall warming.

How do we adjust to what's going on around us?

So pictures of the vessel up at Stone lab in 2014 and 2019.

You can see how high that water was during those time periods.

Okay.

And this is also with this whole slide about water levels.

It gets me into again our trends and what we've been seeing in temperature.

We're curious about what ice levels are going to look like into the future.

Okay.

If you look back through historic time, I think the numbers like 53.3% of the surface area of the Great Lakes gets covered by ice every year.

But in Lake Erie, we see usually a higher number than that.

Because we're a smaller lake, shallower, we can freeze easier.

But what I'm seeing now, looking from year to year, you might have a year where you're 90% of the surface area is covered in ice, and the next year it'll be 10%, and then 80% and then 2%.

And so what we're experiencing right now, and we're having a hard time wrapping our brains around it, is why is that happening and what are the ramifications.

So precipitation as I mentioned also on this topic, we always think that, you know, if we get a lot of rain in like Toledo and Cleveland and Rocky River, that we're going to have a high water level for Lake Erie.

90% of the water coming into Lake Erie comes from the Detroit River.

If we're going to have a high water year, it is coming from the upper Great Lakes.

It is coming from the Minnesota.

Wisconsin's, the Lake Superior and Lake Huron.

So we need to be thinking about the interconnectedness of these Great Lakes and not just keeping our eye on the water levels at Lake Erie.

So we're thinking about water levels.

We're thinking about precipitation, ice cover.

Right.

There is a tremendous industry around ice fishing in the winter.

Right.

And so if we lose those periods of ice or even moderate ice, we are impacting that economic driver.

We talked about water levels being high and how that can cause erosion.

Well, if you don't have ice in the winter when you used to, now you have wave activity because the ice isn't covering that water body that's scouring those shorelines even more.

Okay.

So this whole topic of water levels and environmental variabi I think this might be the last high level issue.

And this is kind of a grab bag slide.

So this is what I call my historic or emerging contaminants slide.

This is where we spend a lot of our time.

And I say we because again, I'm happy to be director of Ohio Cigaret and Snow Lab, but I'm really good at writing reports and shaking hands and kissing babies.

It is an amazing team that I get to work with.

That does this work, and a lot of them are in the room right now.

So historic contaminants just wrap your brain around things like mercury, right?

Things like, DDT, PCBs, those things that were produced and were an issue right, when they were being produced.

Then we think about the emerging contaminants that are, like our plastics, pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

If you're seeing the letters PCP, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, things like fast, which is a little image in the right now, we call these emerging contaminants.

Although if you look back, they were produced historically.

It's just we're now detecting them.

Being able to study them and look at the health impacts.

This is a heavy lift folks.

This is a heavy lift.

So when we look at the pharmaceuticals, if you go to pretty much any river in northwest Ohio right now or in northern Ohio, you're going to find nicotine, caffeine, antidepressants.

It's in the water.

It's there.

Okay.

So how do we find out ways to remove that from the water?

How do we look at the body burden for those things as we're getting exposed faces on everybody's radar?

These are those what we're calling forever chemicals again, we've got to figure out how do we find ways?

You know, with engineering silver bullets or chemistry to to absorb them or trap them.

But these are going to be on our radar for a long time, as is the microplastics.

Right?

I would say, you know, harmful algal blooms keeps me up at night.

A lot of things keep me up at night, but plastics is the one that I'm.

It keeps me up at night, but more because I can't even wrap my head around the solution set for that right now.

Right.

We are doing some great work now and like, how should we be sampling for this?

Like, do we even have the right kind of net with the right pore size?

And you know, where should we be sampling?

We're at that level.

But also we don't know what the impact is on the body yet.

And I'll come back to that.

But even though we can know where it's at and what its likely health impact is, this is not something that the city of Cleveland can say, all right, we're going to do all this.

And the plastic problem goes away.

This is a global problem.

And the solutions are going to be have to have to be global in nature okay.

And so that's why we're working at that.

As far as the health impacts, we have some researchers right now that are doing work to say when you ingest that plastic, is it the plasticizers injected in it?

Is it the dyes that are injected it that are leaching out?

Why we metabolize that, that are causing health issues?

Or is it the biofilm that causes issues?

Those non-scientists out here go pick up a rock in a stream and it's probably slimy.

That's a biofilm is a fancy science word for the algae and bacteria growing on that rock in that river.

Well, those plastics will grow a slimy biofilm, too.

And those then nicotine, antidepressants.

Caffeine can bind to that biofilm.

So the plastic actually becomes a way for us to to dose ourselves.

So is the health impacts because of the things attached and growing on that, plastic or is it the metabolism and break down of that plastic.

And we're just in the infancy of that.

Right now.

We've got a master's student for Bowling Green State University, looking at the genetics of the organisms that are growing on those microplastics right now.

So we got a lot of great work in this space.

But these are ones where I think there's a lot of things.

I know there are a lot of things out there that we're not even really studying, because we haven't even figured out how to detect their presence.

So to come back to that great work that Clean Water Lines does for monitoring, and pushing for innovation to detect these different chemicals and signatures that we see in the like, there's a lot here.

There's a lot to be a little nervous about, a little scared about.

But I can tell you that one thing I've learned since Habs, specifically when it ramped up on our attention in 2014 with the Toledo Drinking Water Advisory, is that, there are solutions and we can get to these, but it has to be again by working in that collaboration.

Right?

I would say what Habs did for the state of Ohio was actually pretty darn amazing.

I came through that academic route, and it was always like this university competing with that university for this grant.

Right.

And those academics living in these tight little, little bubbles, like what I've seen because of Habs and now we're seeing it in plastics and other things, as you see, so many grants that are written by multiple academic institutions collaboratively.

And you're also seeing that those grants are not just scientists sitting around the room saying, this sounds good.

This sounds great.

Let's try this.

It is that broader participation on the front end with our state and federal agencies is the science we want to do.

Actually going to give you a lever to pull to help manage that ecosystem, more efficiently and more appropriately.

And so this is a heavy lift, folks.

It is a lot.

But if we can think back to those original five things, right.

We need to invest in this environment.

We need to protect and restore what we have in our backyard.

We're very fortunate to have in our backyards because not only should we be doing that just for the sake of doing that, but because it helps with the environment or the economy, right?

And we got to say partnerships.

It's got to be the way it is, the future.

It's working together.

Right.

So second thing that I pushed was, was that it's the innovation, right?

It's not just let's talk about like Chad GTP and that's her stuff.

The sensor technology that's rolling out what we can do, is impressive.

But we need to be pushing that science monitoring envelope.

Remember, we can't manage what we don't understand.

And that.

Increased science.

So that monitoring that, we need that we need to do.

And then the last thing that I would, come back to is that broader phrase, the word broader.

We need broader participation on the front end, and we need to do a better job of communicating our craft.

Okay.

This isn't about when I go and speak to drop as many fancy big science words as I can.

It's for me to give a talk and see people in the audience nodding their head and saying, yeah, that makes sense.

I think I can play a role here and a role here.

And that's why before I close out and go to the question slide, what I'm happy to be is I'm based at Ohio State University, but more specifically, I sit in the College of Food AG and Environmental Sciences.

And that's important to note because that is where our land grant mission resides.

And so in land Grant and sea Grant is the sister program of that land grant is trying to do that extension.

It's trying to make sure the work we do in our labs and with our partners gets into the hands of people that need to need to know that.

Great.

I think unless I forgot, there we go with that.

All right.

And we are about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream audience.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here at the City Club.

Today we are joined by Chris Winslow, director of Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Labs at Ohio State University, as part of our annual state of the Great Lakes.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining via a live stream at City club.org.

If you'd like to text a question for Chris, please text it to (330)541-5794 and City Club staff will try our best to work it into the program.

Reminder to keep your questions short to the point and actually a question, so we can get to as many questions as possible.

May we have the first question, please?

Hi, Chris, I'm Bob Heath, member of the board of the Cleveland Water Alliance.

First of all, I want to thank you for really insightful and, wonderful, easy to understand talk.

But there's one thing you didn't mention, and I think that's the sixth thing on your list that needs to be on your list in a capitalistic society.

In order to do something, we need, sufficient funds for that.

Recently, federal funds have been, constrained.

I'm curious how much have those, funds been constrained at the federal level?

How much of those affect have affected sea grant, in particular?

And, the Great Lakes in general?

Thanks, Bob.

Good to see you.

So I can get to the first one is the sea grant component.

So, so for cigaret and Stone lab, about a third of our budget comes from NOAA being a sea grant program.

About a third comes from the Ohio State University, again, being a member of the College of Food AG and Environmental Sciences.

And then the third is us going out and getting grants, endowments.

We actually have a 300,000 from the biennial budget for the governor.

So for us, we know that you need to like all of our investment portfolios.

You need a diversified portfolio, right?

And so we work hard to do that.

The sea grant programs were zeroed in.

The administration's budget.

But this shouldn't come as a surprise to everybody in the room when you get a new administration and when faces change over in Congress, that's part of the country we live in.

Right.

And those folks are going to get elected for reasons that, you know, people that live in their district are going to vote for them.

And so, you know, the budget is always going to change.

And so all that means for me is if something like that is zero or a cut in the budget, all it means to me and my colleagues is to go and say, you know what, we dropped the ball because we didn't illustrate for you the things we do.

And what are the results of those things.

Right?

This story of if you protect the environment or restore the environment, you can prop up the economy.

And so as you all know this, the Congress, Senate and House will be working on bills we did see before recess that there's early language, that puts sea Grant back in at level funding.

And so that for sea Grant is is a really, really, really good thing as far as other cuts across other agencies.

Again, I'm kind of pretty busy in my in my full time job, but I do get to talk some of the agencies where we work with, and there have been some reductions in force.

So we'll see how we can respond to that.

And again, I think it comes back to my second points of partnerships, collaborations, partnerships.

It's going to have to be all hands on deck and so we will identify things that maybe might fall through the cracks.

And we'll figure out how as a team, we can we can get after that stuff.

But Bob, thanks for that question.

My question is about plastics.

And given that 90% of our water is coming from Detroit, there's the 10% coming from, you know, rivers that I assume.

So locally, the Cuyahoga River, which, you know, kind of comes down, touches Akron, comes back up in Akron.

University of Akron polymer research, is a huge thing.

So on a smaller kind of level, I'm wondering about the kind of collaborations that can happen with, science that produced some of the things that we're now trying to get rid of.

Yeah.

So, outside of my room, I'm not in that engineering space, but I know those conversations are happening.

So how are we formulating plastics so that they are more able to be recycled in those sorts of things?

And even just talking to things about, you know, ten years ago, I don't think we were talking as much about a circular economy as we are now.

Like, we got to think whatever we produce that we need to figure out where it goes for its entire lifestyle.

I would tell you, we've we've we're behind the marine systems in the plastics space in the Great Lakes.

We're behind.

We still really don't know.

I mean, if you look in the in peer review journals again, which is kind of our indication of where we think the state of things are going.

There's not enough publications out in the Great Lakes.

And a lot of it is kind of like the health impacts.

So we're bringing that in the lab.

We're saying, what happens if you're exposed?

We're really not seeing a lot of what's going on inside organisms in the lake.

We don't know fully yet.

We're getting a glimpse into where are the sources of these plastics.

You're not seeing when we do open lakes, sampling.

You are catching plastics there, but it's not the vast majority.

It seems like most of them are coming down our rivers.

And there does seem to be a tie with some of our our water treatment facilities that maybe they just don't have the ability to catch as much as we were hoping they were catching.

But there's some great work coming out here.

I just actually, Cleveland water lines keep embarrassing you guys talking about, apparatus that you can put on the back of your washing machine to catch those fibro microplastics.

And so how can we if, if we know it's coming from our house, how can we be proactive and do those solutions in our house with it, rather than waiting for these huge municipalities to try and turn turn on a dime?

Plastics.

Other stuff.

I know Michelle Burks in here, Ohio Marine Trades Association, we work with them on our plastic recycling program.

So when you drive by the lakes in the middle of winter, all the boats are in the lake, are now on land and covered in this blue plastic.

We are now taking that plastic and rather than sending it to a landfill or recycling it.

So there's a little plastic blocks between our guardrails on our highways.

It's a group called Mondo Plastics is doing some of that work.

So we just got to be really creative in this in this space.

At least in Cleveland this year.

In the six years that I've lived here, we've had the most midges.

And so I wonder, just as a sort of citizen scientists.

Is this like cicadas?

And it's a cyclical thing, or does this actually or could this say something positive about our great lake and its, habitat for insects?

Yeah, I think I think it's that I think in general, it's just a good thing.

I mean, the, the, the bottom of the.

And people laugh at me, the bottom of the lake, the benthic of the lake is just in better condition now than it has been historically.

And so this should be a regular occurrence.

I used to get a call from the mayor of Port Clinton asking when when they should turn their lights off because they didn't want the city lights just caked with these organisms.

I'm like, I get it.

So, but actually, if you're from that part of Toledo, if it's not forecasted to rain, but you see clouds on the radar that the news puts out, that's bugs, folks.

That's bugs.

And so they've gotten kind of just used to it, like, we know Father's Day.

That's typically when they come out in June.

And so they just are prepared for that.

Please, Chris, could you say again, Christina County?

Shout out to our students from the Fresh Water Institute at the front table there.

Hello, students.

And beyond here, two tables.

And to students everywhere here on the farm today.

I just wanted to, I guess, channeling you a little bit and ask.

We've had, first year the Freshwater Institute and a lot of our water partners around these tables have participated in job, ideation of where are the jobs in the blue economy?

We know it's a $6 trillion economy.

Obviously, Canada matters a lot to us in terms of that binational, Great Lakes basin production in this economy.

But I wanted to ask you maybe a bit on their behalf.

Where do you see jobs in the future in the blue economy?

As you're tracking them from your perspective?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a great question.

Well, the first one is we're going to have to do some backfilling here soon.

We're hearing what we're hearing from a lot of municipalities that work with what it's been called, the silver tsunami.

I don't know if that's going to land well with many of our folks here, but so we do have this aging of folks in some of the critical positions that are there.

And so, like, you know, at OSU, it's an amazing university.

And I get to work with Bowling Green, and I know Kent and Akron are in the room.

Or we may not be pushing a lot of stuff, like, you want to be a water treatment plant operator, or you want to be a wastewater treatment operator.

We need to be pushing these things.

You go into some of these municipalities, like we have this thing called a pension, and nobody knows what that word means anymore.

And it's this weird kind of thing going on.

But it is going to be a lot of the tech stuff, like we can measure nutrients by sensors pretty well, some of them better than others.

We're going to have to find to that we use satellites for a lot of things, but toxins in those harmful algal blooms.

It's going to take you about four hours from the time you pull that water sample to analyze it, to see whether the toxins are in there.

That's not adequate enough, right?

Because that is going to be in and out through the plant before we've even thought about it.

And so we need to get into that sensor space.

We need to be able to detect these things earlier.

We need to think more about our satellite use.

You know, it's going to have to be, you know, autonomous sampling devices.

So there is a lot of space in the engineering space.

And then with the board of the clean Water lines, I get to work with my in and ody and xylem.

I mean those industries, many of them rooted here in Cleveland.

Like they want to be at that cutting edge.

Like are we able to treat water in our own homes, or are we able to detect what's in that drinking water as we turn on our forces?

I mean, there's a lot of in that sensor and technology space.

I will say, coming from an acade not new but newish lens in these universities is that when we look at the students for training, I think for a while professors are like, I'm going to teach students and these graduates are coming are going to be the next professors.

They're going to backfill on me.

I would argue, you know, maybe 80% of the students that get master's aren't going into academia.

And we got to make sure as we train these students in our in our universities that we're training them for those future jobs.

And then also, I would say probably only half the PhD students are going in academia.

So we're going to think about are we exposing them to the things they need to be exposed through, through their training to get them into that workforce?

But I'm also seeing we're having a hard time getting fiberglass repair.

People in our marinas were having a hard time getting technicians for outboard motors, right.

So we need to be thinking about even those.

Lift up that economy.

Please.

Thank you.

First of all, I'd like to thank you for bringing all of this to the attention.

Because a lot of times things happen without, without ever being advertised or politicized.

I spent 20 years as a, research vessel captain for Noah, and I've done most of what you're talking about here.

I've never had the, behind the scenes.

Access as to the legislative aspect of things.

So what I'm really interested in, I mean, I know all about, all the phenomenon that you've mentioned, but as far as, let's just say, collaboration, your number two, preventive measures for the plastics are there, collaborations between the science, academia and politics?

Can we prevent some of this?

And I know you don't have a crystal ball, but what about being proactive rather than reactive to some of these troublesome phenomena?

Great question.

So I'll start kind of with close to me and then maybe move out a little bit.

So for Ohio sea Grant and Stone lab and this was started under the previous director office of the boss before me, a doctor Jeff Reutter.

Amazing individual.

What an inflection point in my life.

Reminder you all have that inflection point in your life when you leave here today.

Call that influential person in your life and tell them thanks.

But for sea Grant and Stone lab, we have every day three decision maker days.

So the invite list is county commissioners, mayors, state and federal elected officials to bring them to the island.

And then we put those academics in front of them.

We want them to know the work we're doing, that they're probably going to start getting questions from their constituents.

So you need to be proactive in that space.

I'm happy to report that, at least from my lens, again, when I get to go to DC and I go in and say, hey, your first sea grant, more specifically Ohio.

They usually say, we got you.

We're working on getting you back in the budget.

So then it turns in a half an hour I have with them and saying, all right, this group came in and told me this.

Is that true?

And then then this group came in and said, this is the problem.

Is that true?

So there is a want from our elected folks to know that science, because if they're going to write legislation and be forward thinking, then they need to know what is a real reality versus, you know, not really that big of a deal for us, right, right now.

And the other thing that I'll say is, I mentioned it earlier, I could sit on the international joint commissions and basically the agency's role is to to look at environment, Climate Change Canada and U.S.

EPA and say you have certain mandates to do certain things.

Are you doing those things?

And the one discussion we're having right now is to think about in the name is changed through time, and it's in its process is what we call the decadal science plan right now.

And the idea is if you look at the investment in our salty shark field coast, that's scary, right?

Our salt field coast relative to Great Lakes, there's more investment in those marine systems relative to the Great Lakes.

And so we're asking for that and we're asking for it for your purpose.

Jerry is doing a great job of checking the ills of the past, doing stream restoration, going after those areas of concerns or what are called Aoki's.

We have a pool of money to restore habitat from the ills of the past.

We don't really have a funding mechanism to forecast those ills of the future.

And so I can tell you that those discussions are having happening right now.

As you can imagine, they take time and vetting, make sure all the right people at the table, all those sorts of things.

But I'm optimistic.

I do think, again, because of that idea of breaking down these silos, of what's going on in academia and connecting it to agencies with step number one.

But now both those agencies and academics going to our elected officials and saying, you need to know about this, this is around the corner.

We don't know enough or we already know this.

It's time to act.

I'm going to embarrass Director Butler again sometimes with this harmful algal bloom issue.

He would always say, we're building the plane as it's going down the runway, right?

We know we need to get this in the salt.

We need to get this.

But we don't have all the information.

But it doesn't mean we stop progress for perfect.

And that's what we're asking.

A lot of our agencies and elected officials is help us get progress towards that solution.

Please.

Hey, Chris.

Thanks for being here.

You're really a good drawer.

As you can see by the forum.

My question has to do with combined agricultural feed operations.

You talked about the nutrient load coming from fields in general, and I'm curious how much the research is showing.

Are these cfo's that concentrated source, is that an issue?

And what should the state be doing to regulate them to prevent that from being an issue?

Good.

Thanks for the question.

So again, I, I'm going to stay in my science world.

Right?

I'm not a I don't write policy and I don't write regulations, but I can tell you, the nutrient that's the target of getting to a 40%.

Sounds simple, but it's not.

And the reason why I'm going to tell you that is because we usually attack these is like a biology or chemistry solution to that problem.

But as we're looking at it, that's not enough.

And so this is what I'm gonna tell you.

At the mouth of the mommy is that the water is coming down.

It has phosphorus early estimates, and we don't have a solid number on this.

Early estimates say probably about 30% of that phosphorus is coming from what may look like a manure signature.

So it's phosphorus from an animal.

But if you look up in the watershed, a little over 20% of the acres get manure applied.

So it's not disproportionately represented in the water right now.

Early data we're still working on this works.

So the solution set if we thought there was a silver bullet for the harmful algal bloom, there isn't.

There are things we need to do in the commercial fertilizer space.

There's things we need to do in the manure space.

Doctor Lauren Kinsman Costello is probably in the room.

She leads the learn wetland monitoring efforts.

So the lake you're in aquatic research network effort.

So there are a lot of things that are going to get us to that, solution.

But to come back to the manure.

Here's the thing.

If I was a farmer and you gave me a choice of a commercial fertilizer manure, I would take the manure because it doesn't just have the phosphorus, it also has the nitrogen, and it also has the trace minerals, and it has the organics in there.

But there are problems with that, right?

That manure.

Sorry.

You guys are eating again.

There's a lot of water.

Right.

And so to haul that to where it's needed on your field is expensive.

The last number I saw is if you have more than 11 miles you are losing money on that.

So that is a valuable resource that we should be spreading further throughout the watershed.

But we don't have the ability because of the economics to do that.

Even in the commercial space, we are telling our farmers to inject their fertilizer into the ground rather than spread it on the surface.

Okay.

Less likely it's going to run off that piece of equipment that what is called the tool bar to inject that fertilizer might be a quarter of $1 million.

The farmer using that toolbar may not increase their yield, meaning increase revenue.

So we're asking them to buy a $250,000 piece of equipment.

That's not going to increase their bottom line.

And the tractor that's on their farm may not be able to pull that piece of equipment.

So long winded answer to get that manure needs to be watched, right?

We need to make sure that if it's being produced in excess, that it's being spread as far as it can.

It's not being put on the same fields all the time.

We have studies that show if you apply commercial fertilizer on a field and find a near identical field and put manure, manure does not run off more than commercial.

There are the same level of risk of loss.

It's just our relationship with those things.

And so I think I'll leave with this.

Is that this one with the harmful algal blooms and the nutrient issue, sometimes the chemistry, the biology solution we do in our in our academic institutions, in our agencies, it's easy.

But then when you say, do this farmer and you realize there's a cost that has nothing to do with the science, it has everything to do with economics.

And if we say cover crops, we found out this thing works.

Go to the farm and just say, do this thing like I'm pretty darn busy running a farm.

Like, I don't know how to do that.

Like, what do I need to know?

What do I need to avoid?

And so we've got to get away from science is going to solve everything because it's also the social science.

We got to put ourselves in those people shoes.

And it's the economics that make these problems.

That's why when we as academics say it's a wicked problem, it's because the solution requires a can.

Number two partnerships, partnerships, partnerships, an all hands on deck and I would leave this with you too.

We got to relearn how to listen to each other, right?

We have conversations, but I think we're passing each other.

So I'm going to tell you the trick that my wife and I tried to use before, when she makes a discussion point with me.

I am going to repeat it back to her that I. This is what you're saying before I get to respond, and I know I get caught doing this, I hear one sentence out of somebody's mouth and like, oh, I'm going to tell them this next right hook.

And then you don't listen to the rest of what they have to say.

We as a community need to learn how to be better listeners.

Thank you everybody.

So.

You.

Thank you so much to Chris Winslow for joining us at the City Club today.

I know we had a lot of questions queued up that we did not get to.

He will be here a little while after the forum.

Please feel free to ask your question in person.

After this, after we conclude here.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City club.org.

Today's forum is the Stanley and Hope Adelstein Endowed Forum on the environment, the state of the Great Lakes is also presented in partnership with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

Thank you so much to Kyle and her team.

The City Club would also like to welcome students joining us from teaching Cleveland.

And we would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the City of Cleveland Division of Water, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Water Alliance, the Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District, Fresh Water Institute, Friends of Euclid Creek, Macaulay and Company, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, Ohio Marine Trades Association, and the Western Reserve Land Conservancy.

What a turnout.

Thank you so much.

And we have a lot of science nerds in here.

I think you're going to love this.

Just announced on Thursday, September 11th, the City Club will welcome not just one, but two NASA astronauts.

Euclid, Ohio native Sunita Williams recently returned from a lengthy stay aboard the International Space Station, and she will be joined by NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock.

We will mark Ohio's Space Week in partnership with the Great Lakes Science Center, and learn about the importance of space exploration today.

Please get your ticket.

It's going to be amazing.

Thank you once again to Chris Winslow and to our members and friends, to the City Club and to the economy.

This forum is now adjourned.

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