Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel and I are in the same boat, figuratively, on an overcast Wednesday morning in Port Clinton: neither of us have been out on Lake Erie before this.
Each year for more than four decades, elected officials and government workers have descended onto the water via charter boats for a half-day of casting, waiting, catching and often releasing.
I’m on Steve Gray’s boat, literally. Gray, an assistant director for the Ohio Department of National Resources, has been with the agency since 1976, returning from retirement in 2019. Any walleye 15 inches or longer will come back with us, Gray says.
As an industry, ecotourism is booming, something ODNR embraces. Outdoor recreation contributed more than $8 billion each year to Ohio’s overall economy, according to an Ohio State University study from 2019. That’s only grown since COVID-19.
Take birding, a hobby the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 37% of American adults engage in.
“In the hill country of Ohio, we have wild turkeys and whitetail deer and ruffed grouse, we have a variety of songbirds that either nest there or migrate through there,” Gray says. “And then you come to Lake Erie and we’ve got the coastal wetlands, which has a variety of waterfowl, ducks and geese, a lot of shorebirds, egrets, great blue herons.”
The state has leaned heavily into Lake Erie’s western basin, where the walleye abound underwater—and among advertising back ashore.
Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday he would even sign a bill making it the official fish, though that’s been a hot-button issue at the Statehouse for years.
“Tens of thousands of people come to Lake Erie from out of state for the sportsmen’s opportunities, and what that brings. They stay in the hotels, they eat at the restaurants, they stop at the drugstores, of course they spend money at the charter boat companies and the marinas,” Tressel said in an interview.
There’s a murkier reality undercurrent this July, though. The final version of the two-year state budget gutted funding to H2Ohio, the multi-agency clean water initiative Gov. Mike DeWine established in 2019.
“Our greatest jewel, Lake Erie, we got to make sure we take care of that, and of course, water in general,” Tressel says.
DeWine signed the budget June 30. Under it, ODNR, as well as the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency, will have way less to work with in 2026 and 2027. Across agencies, the cuts account for about 40% of H2Ohio funds.
House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima) told the Statehouse News Bureau in June that was because of questions about the initiative’s effectiveness at using the dollars it was appropriated.
“It’s technically accurate to say (we) cut H2Ohio, but we took the money and paid for other similar things, or other things like funding brownfield programs, historic tax credits, a number of things like that,” Huffman said.
Gray says the results were never going to come overnight, but he believes the agency has seen wins in six years of wetland rehabilitation.
“We were trying to get off to a good start,” Gray says. “Now, we’re going to concentrate our efforts more where we think we can do the most good with the least amount of dollars.”
Among its efforts, H2Ohio aims to reduce nutrient runoff from farm fields, which can contribute to harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie. Those algal blooms degrade the water quality of the lake, from which more than 11 million Ohioans get their drinking water.
“Better water quality would make the fish better, the fishing better, and the bird life better, but that’s basically a side benefit,” Gray says.
From 7 to 11 a.m., our boat rocks back and forth under gathering and darkening clouds. I was content to head back to the dock unrewarded—until I felt a tug on my line, reeling in our boat’s tenth legally consumable walleye of the day.
