TOLEDO, OH – The Board of Lucas County Commissioners today urged the public to participate in the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s process to develop and implement a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, for the Maumee River watershed to combat algal blooms and the sources of nutrients that attribute to those blooms.

“Now is the time that we must tell the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency that we must have a total TMDL that is effective and will set limits on dissolved reactive phosphorous, which is the major driver of harmful algal blooms. Failure to set effective measures on dissolved reactive phosphorous won’t get us to the target of a 40 percent reduction of nutrients entering the western basin,” the Lucas County Commissioners said. 

The Commissioners held a press conference today at the Middlegrounds Metropark in Toledo to encourage public participation in the Ohio EPA’s process to develop and implement the TMDL. The agency’s final draft of the TMDL will be formalized by the end of 2022 and submitted to the U.S. EPA for approval next year. 

Maumee TMDL information, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), project timeline, and previous webinar recordings are available on the Ohio EPA’s website at https://epa.ohio.gov/divisions-and-offices/surface-water/reports-data/maumee-river-watershed. Future webinar meetings will be posted on the Ohio EPA’s website. The draft TMDL public comment period will begin on December 31, 2022.