Help needed in spending $46 million on bay, river

GREEN BAY - A pot of cash that’s already improved the area’s environmental health during the past 15 years just grew by more than 76 percent.

The money has already been used to preserve and restore thousands of acres of wetlands to help stock fish in area waters and to construct hiking trails, wildlife viewing platforms and fishing piers, among other things.

Now there’s $46 million more to spend, and if you have some ideas of how, federal and state agencies and the Oneida and Menominee tribes want to hear from you.

The money is Natural Resource Damage Assessment funds that were collected from paper companies and others who contributed polychlorinated biphenyls to area waterways.

The PCBs, linked to cancer and other health problems, were used to produce carbonless copy paper in the 1950s and 1960s, became a byproduct of paper recycling and found their way into the Fox River.

The paper companies will end up paying the more than $1 billion cost of cleaning up the river, with the division of responsibility still being worked out in federal court. Dredging the PCBs from the river bottom began for the season last week and will continue until the river freezes in the fall. The cleanup project is expected to end in 2017.

Fox River cleanup burden shifts again

But the Natural Resource Damages are a different component of the federal Superfund law. They are intended to provide compensation to the public for residual loss, harm to the environment that can’t be simply dredged and hauled away.

That includes incalculable things such as the loss of tourism dollars resulting from decades of not being able to eat the fish caught from the Fox River.

It has no real price tag, but a federal study done in 2000 estimated the overall loss to the public at between $176 million and $333 million.

The public won’t see that much money. The government has been negotiating settlements with the responsible industries the past 15 years. The new $46 million — by far the biggest settlement of all — will be the last of it, bringing the total to just over $106 million.

“We believe they are fair and reasonable settlements,” said Betsy Galbraith of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “By not spending more decades in court, we can get the money on the ground to the resources that need it the most.”

The Fish & Wildlife Service is one of four agencies deciding what to do with the settlement money. The others are the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Menominee Tribe of Indians. Their representation as trustees of the money is established by federal law.

The trustees have been working with area governments and land conservation agencies as well as nonprofit environmental groups such as Ducks Unlimited and various sports fishing groups to select projects for the previous $60 million worth of settlements reached since 2001.

The bay: Tour reveals successes

The money has supported 78 restoration projects. They included building a new fish hatchery for the DNR in Wild Rose, which provides fish to stock in the Fox River and elsewhere.

Settlement money has been used to remove a dam from Duck Creek, restore wild rice growth on the Menominee reservation, restore the Cat Island chain in Green Bay and preserve and restore more than 10,000 acres of wetland and upland habitat, mostly along the western shoreline of the bay.

By working with other government and nonprofit entities, the trustees have managed to almost double their $60 million settlement by using it in dollar-for-dollar matching programs.

Those projects arose out of a spending plan the trustees developed in 2003. Now, with an additional $46 million in the pot and 15 years of experience, the trustees have revised the plan.

They want you to look at it, comment on it and suggest possible projects that would meet the plan’s criteria.

You can do that at a public meeting to be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday at the Brown County Central Library, 515 Pine St. You can see the updated restoration plan document at www.foxrivernrda.org

psrubas@pressgazettemedia.com, and follow him on Twitter@PGpaulsrubas

Natural Resource Damage Assessment settlements

2001: Appleton Paper and NCR Corp., $34.3 million

2002: Fort James Operating Co. and Georgia Pacific, $16.4 million

2004: Wisconsin Tissue Mills and PH Glatfelter Co., $4.2 million

2009: City of De Pere, $0.04 million

2010: George A. Whiting Paper Co., Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District, Green Bay Packaging Inc., Heart of the Valley Metropolitan Sewerage District, International Paper Co., LaFarge North America Inc., Leicht Transfer & Storage Co., Neenah Foundry Co., Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co., Union Pacific Railroad Co., and Wisconsin Public Service Corp., $0.52 million

2013: Brown County, city of Green Bay and federal agencies, $4.44 million

2014: Kimberly Clark Corp. and NewPage Wisconsin Systems Inc., $0.25 million

2015: City of Appleton, CBC Coating Inc., Menasha Corp., Neenah-Menasha Sewerage Commission, U.S. Paper Mills Corp. and WTM I Co., $46 million

Total: $106.15 million

Learn more

A public meeting will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday in Central Meeting Room 1 of the Brown County Central Library, 515 Pine St. You can submit comments on the revised NRDA plan there or by visiting www.foxrivernrda.org