As I sit at the computer during yet another blizzard, I can’t help but wonder why I’m here blogging rather than in someplace warm on the deck of a sailboat. It is clearly the “fault” of a number of people in my past including:
· The fantastic boss who got me interested in sailing 40 years ago,
· The many fascinating members of Cleveland Amateur Boatbuilding Society who imported cheap boat kits from England and taught many non-sailors how to build and enjoy beach boats like the Mirror Dingy,
· The members of the International Fireball Class Association who taught me to build fast boats and to relish sailing flat out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgUWxWOMk0I
· The realtor who convinced me I “needed” an open water landing for my Fireball
· The neighbors who wanted rocks placed on my landing beach to “fix the erosion problem” caused by Lake Erie’s rising levels of the 80’s and 90’s.
· The half-dozen like-minded lakefront owners who formed the Ohio Lakefront Group to seek legislative action clarifying that they owned what their deeds said
· Other property owners throughout the Great Lakes who formed the International Great Lakes Coalition to seek out reasonable controls for the water levels of the Great Lakes.
· The Cleveland Marshall Law Professor who took no mercy on an aging first year law student and ripped to shreds my first attempt at defining the so-called public trust boundary at the edge of the Lake in 1999.
And here I sit watching it snow. I no longer naively think that I am no longer naive. Instead, I realize that there are many unanswered questions, including legal, technical and political ones, which will determine the future of the Great Lakes and the people of the region. The legal ones, at least in Ohio, will be answered by the Ohio Supreme Court, in the not too distant future. Hopefully the Court will reach a just solution in a few months based on the thousands of pages of legal briefs. In addition, there were53 minutes of oral arguments offered for their consideration. http://supremecourtofohiomedialibrary.org/Media.aspx?fileId=128853
The unanswered technical and political questions are, at this point, of far greater immediate concern. Of those, the variability and control of lake levels is the greatest long-term threat to Lake Erie. Excessive and abnormal levels were the root cause of wide-spread public and private property damage in the last part of the 20th century. Amplifying the damage caused by fluctuating lake levels was the effect of ill-conceived projects meant to protect the shore.
While levels are a long-term concern, a focus on levels should not prevent those of us in Ohio from taking short term actions to repair our public beaches.
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