S.S. Badger Grant Application: Economic Stimulus or Reward for Polluters

The normally cool and calm waters of Lake Michigan have been turned into a boiling, roiling tempest in recent weeks by a federal grant application by the city of Ludington, MI which is seeking $14 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to replace the coal-burning powerplant of the S.S. Badger.

The Badger has come under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scrutiny in recent years particularly for the ships practice of dumping coal ash into Lake Michigan. The EPA has given the owners of the Badger, privately-held Lake Michigan Carferry, until the end of the 2012 sailing season to halt the practice of dumping coal ash and the carcinogens and trace heavy metals associated with it into the lake.

The S.S. Badger has been burning coal and dumping the residual ash into Lake Michigan for the last 57 years. During the course of the nearly 500 Lake Michigan crossings the coal-burner makes during its May-October navigation season, the 1953-built S.S. Badger consumes an estimated 70 tons of bituminous coal per day. From this coal-burning, the ship is left with roughly 7-10 tons of coal ash per day which is mixed with water and pumped directly into Lake Michigan. Since the SS Badger sails approximately 150 days per year, the resulting coal ash dumping into the lake can be conservatively estimated at more than 1,000 tons per year.

In order to comply with the 2012 ash-dumping deadline imposed by the EPA, the owners of Lake Michigan Carferry have turned to the taxpayers, local government officials and Washington, DC-based lobbyists for help.

According to Wisconsin-based opponents of the plan, they've developed a scheme to take federal tax dollars, appropriated by the Congress and originally intended for economic stimulus spending on transportation infrastructure projects, to use the local government as a pass-through for that money to end up in the private corporate hands of the Lake Michigan Carferry. Under this plan Lake Michigan Carferry would only have to come up with $2 million in matching funds with the taxpayers footing the remaining $14 million of the total bill.

“We feel pretty confident about it,” Ludington City Manager John Shay told The Muskegon Chronicle regarding the receipt of the government funds.

But while Ludington city spokesmen have expressed confidence that their plan for the Badger will be funded, other Great Lakes communities, notably Muskegon, MI and Milwaukee, WI where the Lake Express high-speed ferry operates are fighting the Ludington grant application.

 “We respectfully oppose the use of public grant money ...being used to directly subsidize a company ... due to the market-altering precedent it would set,” Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce Government Affairs Director Steve Baas wrote to federal transportation officials.

Muskegon Mayor Steve Warmington has also written letters to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) and Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Carl Levin (D-MI) opposing the federal tax money grant for the Badger.

For his part, Rep. Hoekstra, who is leaving the Congress after losing a primary held several weeks ago for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, says he has taken no position on the Ludington stimulus grant for the Badger.

Usually the support of the local congressman is critical to the success of federal grant applications. Taking into account the absence of Rep. Hoekstra's strong support, the active opposition of officials in Milwaukee and Muskegon, the prevailing political current in the country which is running toward fiscal restraint and against additional government stimulus spending and corporate bailout programs and the growing outrage on the part of environmental groups about programs that reward corporate polluters with federal tax dollars, it would appear that this battle is far from being over.