Tammy Baldwin Wants More Funding For Great Lakes Dredging

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., is calling on the House to act on a bill that would increase funding for dredging in Great Lakes ports.

Baldwin toured the port of Green Bay to advocate for investment into dredging in that port and others in the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi river. In May, the Senate passed the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), which sets aside a portion of annual port spending for the Great Lakes.

“The resources of this bill historically went to coastal ports on our oceans and not to ports on the Great Lakes,” says Baldwin. “We included language that created at least an expectation that 20 percent of the funds go to Great Lakes ports.”

Baldwin says it was also discovered that a lot the money that ports had set aside for dredging and improvements was going unspent. The unspent money amounted to several hundred million dollars.

“It is one billion dollars a year now up, from $800 million in previous years,” says Baldwin. “They collect about $1.6 billion dollars a year. We’d like to see that increase, and the expectation in the WRDA bill is that it will go up by $100 million a year. A fraction of that is in the Great Lakes, where we are quite far behind in our dredging.”

Besides concerns about economic development, Baldwin says port maintenance is a matter of security. Baldwin is a member of the Senate committee on Homeland Security.