" A betrayal of trust", Bush Budget may Sink Great Lakes Restoration Plan. Former backers have lost faith in president to execute $20B strategy two months after its adoption. 3/9 - President Bush's proposed budget cuts have some people wondering if his administration's master plan for restoring the Great Lakes is sunk less than two months after it was adopted. The Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy, a $20 billion set of priorities with no new sources of federal funding to do the work, was once called little more than a public relations stunt by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., before it was completed in Chicago on Dec. 12.

Attention has turned to Bush's proposal to cut nearly $200 million more from the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water State Revolving Fund during the 2007 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That fund is the main source of federal money that states use to help municipalities finance sewer projects, and sewer projects are the biggest component of the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy. It's the second consecutive year the national sewage fund could get whacked. In the current budget, it was reduced by $360 million and accounted for the majority of the half-billion cut from the federal EPA's $8.1 billion budget. The Lakes are affected by two other proposed cuts: Some $2 million from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, which helps combat exotic species, and more than $1 million from the U.S. EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago, which administers programs. "You judge these things not by what somebody says about them, but what the facts are," Dingell told the Toledo Blade. He said he met with EPA Administrator Steve Johnson on Dec. 7 and "chewed him out thoroughly" for going along with the no-new-funding plan for the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy. The strategy's $20 billion set of priorities stemmed from a process that involved more than 1,500 public officials, tribal leaders, business representatives, environmental activists, and citizen groups who met for more than a year.

On Oct. 28, a task force of senior White House officials recommended no new spending. Some national groups that went along with it, such as the National Wildlife Federation, are now seething about the proposed budget cutbacks. "The president is ignoring the plan his own presidential task force put forth in December," said Jordan Lubetkin, spokesman for the group's Great Lakes regional office in Ann Arbor. "Quite frankly, the budget is a betrayal of trust," he said, explaining that National Wildlife Federation had supported it in "good faith." The White House, in its online analysis posted on its Web site, said the president's budget "continues to support state and tribal efforts to improve water quality through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund," even with less money budgeted.( Reported by Frank Frisk from the Toledo Blade)