A Decade of Lake Monitoring Winds Down

The following is a draft article for our volunteer newsletter which explains the reduction of funding for statewide lake monitoring:

Eleven years ago, I applied for and received a grant from EPA to monitor Washington's lakes. There was an obvious need to do this. Ecology had long-standing state-funded programs to monitor rivers and marine waters, but no one kept tabs on our lakes. Over the years, Ecology staff and 244 citizen volunteers together have collected over 100,000 data points. Using these data, we have been able to assess 184 lakes in 32 counties all across the state.

I am sorry to report that the summer of 2000 was our last season of full lake monitoring. Until recently, our monitoring work was funded primarily by the federal Clean Lakes program, but in 1996 Congress folded that program into the larger Non-Point Source Program (NPS, also called 319) and instructed NPS coordinators to include lakes when they allotted funds. The North American Lake Management Society (NALMS) immediately argued that the NPS bureaucracy would not treat lakes on an equal footing with their existing NPS projects and this prediction was soon confirmed as funding for lakes across the nation began to dry up. Fortunately, our state's NPS program had a budgeted project cancelled just at a critical time for us, and they gave us the funds we needed to keep going--if fact, for a few years, we received more money than we had under the old Clean Lakes program and we were able to develop more intensive "lake-specific" monitoring procedures. However, although Congressional and EPA guidance to fund lakes projects is more specific this year than it has been in the past ("We suggest that each State use at least 5 percent of its section 319 funds for Clean Lakes activities..."), Ecology has determined that its traditional NPS projects are higher priority and our funding this year has been reduced to the minumum needed to maintain the volunteer portion of the Lake Water Quality Assessment program. Nor are Ecology's NPS coordinators funding any other lakes projects this year.

It is possible that loss of grant funding could eventually turn out to be a blessing. We have on a number of occasions argued for dedicated funding for lake monitoring but have not been successful, in part, I believe, because we were already funded through a federal grant. We will continue to press for funding and perhaps one day the legislature and/or Ecology will recognize the need to monitor the health of some of our state's most valuable resources.

Until then, what can you do? First, keep monitoring! Although our objectives have changed from water quality assessment to long-term transparency monitoring, those data could still be invaluable. You never know when a long-term data set will be needed, and, perversely, long-term data can only be collected before it is needed. Second, express your opinions about lakes to your elected officials: county, state, and federal, as well as to the Department of Ecology. Squeak! In government, the squeaky wheel often gets the grease.

I want to close by recognizing all the hours (I estimate 10,000 so far!) you have invested on behalf of our state's lakes. Twelve lakes have been sampled every year since 1989, and six volunteers have been active every year from the beginning. The efforts of Julie Rector, Kirk Smith, Maggie Bell-McKinnon, and especially you, the volunteers, helped to make Washington's Lake Water Quality Assessment program one of the best in the nation. Our data will always be there and someday, someone desperate for historical data on a particular lake will be even more grateful to you than I.

Dave Hallock