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By Kelly Dudzik - February 18, 2022
The money will pay for environmental cleanup in the Great Lakes region.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Part of the bipartisan infrastructure law includes new funding to help clean up the environment. A big chunk of that money will go right to the Great Lakes region and various clean up efforts.
So specifically here in Western New York, we're talking about three locations: the Buffalo River, the Niagara River, and Eighteen Mile Creek.
We don't have a breakdown of exactly how much money will go to each project yet, but we do know that more than $3 billion will be invested in the Great Lakes over the next five years. Of that total, $1 billion of it is newly announced funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Law. The rest is from the ongoing Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
"Now we can envision a day in the not too distant future where the Buffalo River, the Niagara River, Eighteen Mile Creek, and Rochester Embayment can be restored to their former glory. This will provide immense benefits to the millions of people throughout the Western New York region. It's going to help protect drinking water. It's going to support local economic development and job creation. And, it's also going to contribute to healthier communities, particularly to those that are most vulnerable in our society," Brian Smith with the Citizens Campaign for the Environment said.
So Smith says now with the funding and a plan in place, it's time for everyone to work together to get the job done and clean up the problem spots.
For delisting the Buffalo River as an "Area of Concern," the EPA is saying the delisting process could start in late 2024.
All of this money is going towards cleaning up 22 designated areas of environmental concern in the Great Lakes region. It will allow 22 of the 25 remaining areas of concern to be delisted by the year 2030. More than $97 million in federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Funding has been invested in Western New York already between 2010 and 2021 helping to pay for 254 projects in Erie and Niagara Counties.
Here's an example of what it actually does.
"It's going to enable us to really accelerate contaminated sediment contamination and remediation in 17 areas in the Niagara River that we're currently targeting and looking at right now. We're still a little early into some of the investigations. It's going to take probably another year or two years to really scope everything out, but we're working very closely with US EPA , the Army Corps of Engineers, trying to keep the Water Keeper very much in the loop as things evolve and trying to make sure that we clean these waterways up to a level that will be acceptable to the overall Great Lakes community and Western New York community," said Don Zelazny with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Congressman Brian Higgins said on Friday that there is a great rate of return.
He says it's called the "multiplier effect" by economists and it means infrastructure always returns more than what you originally contribute to it. Higgins explained that for every dollar you spend, the return to the economy is $3.35, but for Buffalo and Detroit, the return is $4.00.
That is that is why, in addition to helping the environment, they are trying to get as much money for our region as possible.