GREEN BAY, WIS. — The Green Bay Backers are playing for a touchdown. Whether they make it will be measured in the year 2000 by beaches open for swimming and fish that are safe to eat.
Best known for its professional football team, the Packers, the Green Bay area also has the world`s heaviest concentration of paper mills. They line the banks of the lower Fox River, which empties into Green Bay. The bay is a long arm of Lake Michigan.
That`s where the Backers come in. They are local citizens who have drafted a plan that spells out their hopes and dreams for a cleaner Green Bay, now one of America`s most polluted waterways.
Its 275 pages are written in language so clear and compelling that U.S. and Canadian environmental experts praise it as a model for citizen action plans that must be developed for heavily polluted harbors all around the Great Lakes.
In 1985, the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian body mandated by treaty to protect the Great Lakes, identified 42 sites on all five of the lakes where local cleanup action is needed to guard the environment and human health. Leading examples include:
- Heavy PCB (polychlorinated byphenyl) contamination of Waukegan Harbor on Lake Michigan.
- Large deposits of industrial wastes in the Indiana Harbor Canal, also on Lake Michigan.
- PCB contamination of the St. Louis River at Duluth on Lake Superior.
- Heavy metal pollution of Michigan`s Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron.
- Toxic organic chemicals in Cleveland`s Cuyahoga River on Lake Erie.
- Heavy metals in Canada`s Spanish River near Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. - Toxic chemicals in New York`s Rochester Harbor on Lake Ontario.
- Heavy metals on Toronto`s waterfront on Lake Ontario.
The commission has asked communities at the 42 toxic hot spots to develop cleanup plans by 1991. Only seven, including Green Bay, have responded so far. In May, commission officials toured the Green Bay area and proclaimed its plan far ahead of all others.
``Historically, we had separate programs for agricultural, industrial and municipal pollution, and fish and widlife,`` said John Hartig, the commission`s remedial action plan coordinator. ``Everyone was doing their own thing without recognizing the impacts on each other.``
By contrast, he said, the Green Bay ecosystem plan ``is a major step in institutional cooperation to get at pollution`` by identifying what cleanup action should be taken, when, by whom, and the advantages expected.
But there are still unanswered questions, including where the $640 million price tag will come from. Neither the U.S. nor Canada has allocated federal funds for such efforts.
As a first step, a $126 million expansion of area sewage rates is planned, which will cause household rates in Green Bay to jump 50 percent.
``Certainly, the City of Green Bay alone can`t finance it,`` frets Mayor Samuel Halloin. ``That is the most difficult question.``
And Wayne Willford, an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, warns that programs aimed at removing toxic harbor sediments are fraught with questions about safely and what to do with the sediments after they are removed.
The Green Bay project is a pioneer in the so-called ecosystem approach to toxic cleanup-in effect, considering Green Bay as a highly complex and ever-changing natural system.
The cleanup plan lists 120 recommendations in 16 key areas. It is so detailed that it specifies that Green Bay someday should contain 10 adult walleyes and 3 northern pike per acre.
There`s a reason for that. Green Bay is loaded with carp, which eat organisms that would otherwise feed on algae. The plan assumes that predators like walleye and pike would eat the carp, giving the algae-eating organisms a chance to clear the water.
``This program will allow us to have healthy industry and also allow us to have fish people can catch and eat,`` said Dr. Jack Day, one of the architects of the plan.
The task ahead is monumental. The are 14 paper mills and 5 major municipal sewage treatment plants along a 39-mile stretch of the Fox, all flushing their wastes into it. Waters and sediments are tainted with 129 toxic chemicals, including cancer-causing PCBs.
Because of them, no fish caught in the lower Fox River is safe to eat, according to state health advisories. In the 119-mile-long bay itself, 10 species are described as hazardous.
Bay Beach Park, a playground for generations of local youngsters, has been closed to swimming since the 1930s. Beyond its rubble-strewn shore, the algae-glutted waters are pea-soup-green and fish can die of oxygen starvation. ``For 40 years, from 1930 to 1970, the rivers and bay became increasingly polluted with municipal and industrial pollution,`` said Day, a University of Wisconsin professor of environmental science and chairman of the Green Bay Metropolitan Sewage District.
The Green Bay Backers want the bay restored as a natural aquatic breeding ground and playground. Kent Fuller, a Great Lakes specialist with the EPA, lauds their plan because it springs from local people and their needs.
``The core of the plan is a clear statement of the problem and a clear statement of what should be done,`` he said. ``It is in very human terms.``