As Lake Champlain has been dealing with toxic phosphorous and algae blooms, Vermont has put nearly one billion dollars into a clean water initiative. But after all that money, and twenty years of work, the Lake hasn't gotten much cleaner. And Vermonters have been left with a lot of unknowns. WAMC’s Producer Annie Bennett sat down with Jonathan Mingle at Seven Days, a reporter of the "Troubled Water" series to talk about how they investigated this issue and where it stands now:
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jonathan Mingle: The big finding from our reporting so far is that Vermont is a decade into a massive cleanup effort. It spent nearly a billion dollars in state and federal money on cleaning up waters of the state, including tributaries of Lake Champlain and the lake itself, and it is falling behind, and the progress isn't showing up in the lake itself. In fact, parts of the lake seem to be getting worse, particularly in terms of toxic algae blooms or cyanobacteria blooms, which continue to plague parts of the lake and affect people who live near or on the lake. They're an eyesore, but they're much more than that. They have health impacts on people who are exposed to them. They're bad for the ecosystem and other aquatic wildlife, and they also affect Vermont's tourism industry, which is the second biggest economic sector in the state. So, for all these reasons, there was broad bipartisan support over a decade ago in Vermont to tackle this problem.
Annie Bennett: So, I was reading your articles, and it sounded like the main thing that was wrong, I guess, was that they did not do this audit that they were supposed to do? So, I'm a little confused about if the fault lies in the way that they've actually been using the money and trying to clean up the water, or if it's been because they are not following procedure that shows that they're doing it right.
Jonathan Mingle: Just to zoom out a bit, this problem has plagued Lake Champlain for decades, and so the EPA in 2016 went to the state of Vermont and said, "Look, you need to do more to reduce this pollution and tackle this problem in a serious way." And Vermont responded by passing a law, its own Clean Water Act. After that law passed, Vermont came strong out of the gate with a lot of programs to update rules for farms, which are the biggest source of phosphorus runoff. So, a whole bunch of efforts, and they set up a clean water fund, and that fund was set up with durable revenue streams. So, a share of, like, a property tax surcharge, and rooms and meal tax, basically it was legislators saying like, “Look, we think this is important. We're going to set up these permanent funding streams.” And Vermont has used that and spent a lot of money, set up a lot of programs, everything from improving, you know, grants to help rural road crews reduce erosions during heavy rains, building wetlands, gravel wetlands to capture phosphorus running off of parking lots, you name it. The question is, is it working? And why isn't that progress showing up in the lake itself? So why is that? And the audit would have been a chance to help answer that question. And it was mandated by Vermont State Legislature. It was supposed to be submitted to lawmakers in 2023. Basically a study by outside independent experts of how effective has all this spending been in actually improving water quality, and what kind of bang are Vermonters getting for their buck here?
Annie Bennett: From an investigative perspective, how did you find out the audit was missing? Can you talk to me about your reporting process for this a little bit?
Jonathan Mingle: It became apparent, you know, in response to one public record request for this audit, I was like, “Oh, this audit was required in 2015…they extended the deadline, you know, supposed to be submitted in 2023.” I asked for the audit. They came back and said, “Oh, we can't give you that because it never happened.” And then we started asking officials and said, "What do you think about this?" And a lot of them didn't even know! Some of them were retired, some very prominent lawmakers who had been champions for the Clean Water Fund and champions for clean water legislation in the State House. And when they found out, they were pretty upset. And some of them said it points to a lack of oversight from Vermont's citizen legislature. Then there was no follow-up from the state agency side that are kind of spearheading this clean water spending. So, it seems to be all around a failure to follow up on this, again: legally mandated audit that was really just intended to look closely at: Are we getting the results we think we're getting for this money? If not, what are the most cost-effective ways to invest finite amount of money we have available to clean up this phosphorus problem? And then the third thing it was supposed to look at was: The state agencies that are enforcing farm water quality rules, are they doing a good job at it? And so those pieces of the puzzle weren't filled in.
Annie Bennett: What is next? Will the audit happen, now that you've brought attention to this? Where does this story go from here?
Jonathan Mingle: Well, we talked to the chair of the Vermont Senate Natural Resources Committee, and she said she was going to bring it up in the next session, and potentially revive at least discussions about trying to get this audit done. Maybe changing the scope. It sounds like they might pursue it, and in fact, I think there's an oversight hearing next week in which they're going to talk about this. You know, depending on who you talk to, there's plenty of blame to go around - lawmakers failing to pursue oversight of this issue after they set up this law and this mandate a decade ago, this Vermont administration, the governor and his agency heads, there's been some kind of tension over the years between the environmental agency and the agriculture agency about how to approach improving water quality on farms and reducing water pollution from farms. There's no one lone bad actor here, and because phosphorus comes from all kinds of activities, and it comes from wastewater, it comes from stormwater, comes from people's lawns. So, it's the systems issue, and our reporting is going to approach it from all these different angles.
