One sickening sentiment jumped into Nelson French’s mind last week when he heard the news a U.S. House subcommittee had voted to slash funding by 80 percent for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

“The House must want something from the Senate,” the supervisor of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency office in Duluth told the News Tribune Opinion page, recounting his reaction.

Politics. Of course. How else to explain taking an initial step to gut a concerted, long-overdue, effective cleanup and revitalization effort that dates back to the presidency of George W. Bush? Especially with the world’s largest — and sometimes, historically, worst-treated — water supply hanging in the balance? Give us what we want, Senate, and we in the House will restore the funding. Whether that sort of unfortunately typical D.C. political posturing (Americans outside of Congress call it political manure — or worse) is really what’s going on, as French cynically suspects, will be revealed when a House committee takes up the issue.

The estimated 30 million people who live around the Great Lakes and who depend on its cleanliness and vitality not only for drinking water but for recreation, tourism and more can hope committee members, unlike those in the subcommittee, see the immense value of the initiative. More than $1.3 billion has been successfully invested in the past four years alone to combat invasive species, reduce polluted runoff, clean up and reclaim contaminated sediment, and restore wetlands and habitats.

We’ve come too far to suddenly strip funding and return to “the old days where we were long on rhetoric about what we wanted to do, but short on funding,” as Todd Ambs, campaign director for the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, said during a teleconference last week, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A move to slash funding comes at a particularly precarious time for the Duluth area and the St. Louis River, which is home to one of 43 “areas of concern” identified and listed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Should we be concerned? Sure. But I’m a guy with my glass half full. So I say let’s redouble our efforts to communicate how important this is,” French said. “We have a bold and aggressive plan to restore the estuary by 2025. It’s inclusive, it’s comprehensive and targeted, it’s aggressive, and it’s timely. We are confident.”

All of us with a stake in the health and future of the Great Lakes — including ours, the greatest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior — could feel a whole lot more confident if Congress immediately restored funding and then refused to play politics with something so critical.

— Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune