The fish are back, but there's still work to be done in the Saginaw River and Bay

People are fishing again on the Saginaw River.

"As a kid, I grew up in Bay City, and I could remember driving right over the river when it was frozen," says Bill Wright, who chairs the Partnership for the Saginaw Bay Watershed, an organization formed to coordinate environmental restoration efforts. "But there were some big holes near the outflows. And you never saw people out there ice-fishing."

That was before the city started improving the sewage treatment systems and government regulations began limiting what industries could discharge into the river.

"The once-abundant fish population in the river and bay had crashed," says Wright. "Even if you could catch a fish, you wouldn't want to eat it, because the fish back then often had an oily or chemical taste and smell to them. And the river itself just wasn't very clean."

But as the Saginaw River and Bay got cleaner, the fish slowly came back.

"These days, you'll see these groups out in downtown Bay City, lifting out huge and delectable fish," says Wright.

To be sure, the walleye did get some help from a fish stocking operation. And there are still consumption advisories on how much fish you can safely eat from the Saginaw River and Bay, the same as for any fish caught in the state of Michigan. The fish and wildlife populations in these waterways are not yet fully recovered. But the oily or chemical smells and flavors are gone, and restrictions on using the river and bay as sources of drinking water have been lifted as well.

The Saginaw River and Bay have come a long way, but they still have ways to go before they can truly be called restored.

An 'Area of Concern'

The combined Saginaw River and Saginaw Bay are what is called a Great Lakes Area of Concern (AOC). Sometimes referred to as "toxic hot spots," these are bodies of water that have been singled out for special attention to correct environmental problems caused by human activity. Forty-three of them were designated by the United States and Canada under the 1987 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, including 14 all or partly in the state of Michigan.


Map data source: USEPA. Acquired with the assistance of ECT Inc.


The problems in Great Lakes AOCs are technically referred to as "beneficial use impairments" (BUIs). These are situations where the physical, chemical or biological integrity of the resource has been compromised.  

In the Saginaw AOC, the impairments include beach closings due to high bacteria counts (usually attributed to sewage or animal wastes), degraded aesthetics (oil slicks, trash or other visible pollution), bird/animal deformities or reproduction problems, and restrictions on navigational dredging (to avoid stirring up toxic sediments), among others.

Some BUIs have been removed, specifically the ones on drinking water and fish/wildlife flavors. But fully restoring the watershed and AOC is a big job. According to current projections, it's expected to be well into the next decade before we have corrected all of the Saginaw River and Bay BUIs and officially "delisted" it as an Area of Concern.

Wright's group serves as the public advisory council, or PAC, for the Saginaw River and Bay AOC. Each AOC has a PAC, which are groups of local representatives who help guide restoration efforts by identifying needs, sorting through proposals and making recommendations for specific projects. Often, the members are representatives of volunteer groups and other organizations that play an active, hands-on role in restoration projects.

While the U.S. and Canadian federal governments have final say, primary authority for AOC restoration projects is largely delegated to the states and provinces, with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) playing the lead role in Michigan. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is the main federal entity on the U.S. side, though other federal and state agencies play significant roles as well.

Funding for AOC restoration efforts got a significant boost when Congress passed the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) in 2010, which established a framework for environmental restoration in the Great Lakes and authorized funding. Since then, with bipartisan support, the GLRI has provided about $300 million a year for restoration efforts, funding some 2,500 projects in the AOCs over the first five years.

State and private funding play a role as well. In the Saginaw AOC, a key player has been the Saginaw Bay Watershed Initiative Network (WIN), an umbrella group of a dozen private foundations that provide grants for environmental projects in the Saginaw Bay Watershed.

The Saginaw River and Bay AOC covers the 22-mile length of the river, from its starting point at the confluence of the Shiawassee and Tittabawassee out through the entire bay. The Saginaw Bay watershed is the largest in Michigan, covering an area about the size of New Jersey with 22 counties and draining 15 percent of the state's land mass. As such, it's the largest of all 43 Great Lakes AOCs, and many of its problems come from upstream tributaries.

A toxic legacy

Most of the impairments in the Saginaw AOC are related to contaminated sediments, says John Riley, coordinator of the Saginaw River and Bay AOC with the MDEQ. This is the result of toxic discharges from chemical plants and other industries along the river and its major tributaries. Toxins mingling with the sediments on river bottoms are taken up by fish and bottom-dwelling organisms and leach into the water as well.

A 1998 settlement with General Motors, Saginaw and Bay City resulted in the removal of nearly 350,000 cubic yards of some of the most heavily PCB-contaminated sediment from the Saginaw River. Regular navigational dredging by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has reduced toxin loads as well.

Current sediment cleanup efforts are being conducted under the Unites States Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program, and are gradually working their way down the Tittabawassee River toward Saginaw Bay. But even when that's completed, the rivers will still not be fully healed.

"Once you clean up an area, it takes time to see the concentrations in fish tissues decline," Riley says.

There have been other problems as well. Destruction of wetlands and other habitats over the years have eliminated the habitats fish and wildlife need to reproduce and grow, further diminishing their numbers. Agriculture runoff has filled the rivers with sediment, fertilizer and animal wastes. Antiquated wastewater treatment systems discharge poorly and even untreated sewage into the rivers and their tributaries.

"I think one of the challenges for the Saginaw AOC is its sheer size," says John Beard, a consultant with Public Sector Consultants (PSC), a contractor that has played a major role in assessing conditions and developing restoration plans for the AOC.

"That's one of the catch-22s of this thing," Beard says. "Many of the issues they're trying to address originate farther back in the watershed."

Eutrophication and muck

One of the BUIs in the Saginaw AOC continues to be eutrophication, or excessive algae growth, which reduces oxygen levels in the water, killing or driving away fish. While there's evidence that Saginaw Bay may be naturally prone to such outbreaks of "muck," excessive nutrient loads — from sewage, excess fertilizer and livestock wastes — have made the problem significantly worse.

Following enactment of the Clean Water Act in 1972, communities in the Saginaw Bay watershed spent over $800 million in four decades to overhaul and improve their sewage systems, funded largely by federal and state grants and loans.

Many of these were focused on separating combined sewer systems, which use the same pipes to collect both sewage and stormwater. Those systems can be overwhelmed by a downpour, sending "combined sewer overflows" (CSOs) of stormwater and sewage to adjacent rivers and streams.

On the agricultural front, Beard says PSC worked with farmers to implement "best management practices" such as improved manure management and planting buffer strips of vegetation between waterways and farm fields to stop sediment, fertilizer and pesticides from getting into the water. Bay County also played a leading role in eliminating the use of phosphorous in lawn fertilizer, enacting its own ban in 2007.

Measures like these play a big role in restoring the health of the benthos, or bottom-dwelling organisms, and of populations of phytoplankton and zooplankton (plant and animal microorganisms), which play key roles in the aquatic food chain. All are considered degraded in the Saginaw AOC and are listed as impairments, along with fish and wildlife populations.

While progress has been made and CSOs have been nearly eliminated in the watershed, excessive algae and eutrophication are still considered an impairment.

Restoring fish and wildlife habitat

Fish and wildlife habitat are also big issue in the Saginaw AOC, though they are no longer considered impaired. Prior to European settlement, the Saginaw Bay watershed held one of the most extensive collections of wetlands in the entire Great Lakes, some 700,000 acres. In addition to being a major fishery, it was and remains an important stop for migratory waterfowl, with as many as 250,000 ducks covering the bay in years past.

The PAC has set a goal of preserving 60 percent of remaining coastal wetlands through conservation easements or outright purchase by conservation groups or public entities, a target that was met in 2014. Beard says that represents some 19,000 acres, about 1½ times the size of the city of Saginaw or roughly one 6x6-mile standard township, in permanent preservation.

A series of underwater rock formations in the inner bay once served as key fish spawning areas in Saginaw Bay, but they've been buried under sediments brought down from the river. While there are no plans to clear those off, other steps are being taken to increase spawning habitat elsewhere.

Several hundred dams have been built along the various tributaries of the Saginaw River over the years, for a variety of purposes. Many are now obsolete, but they still prevent fish from moving upstream to historic spawning habitat.