New York ballast rules battle may end soon, says U.S. Seaway head

The head of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp. believes Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will help the shipping industry fight New York state’s “scientifically unachievable” ballast standards.

“We met on Tuesday with the Cuomo folks,” said Collister W. Johnson Jr., U.S. Seaway administrator, on Thursday. “We had a very good conversation. Cuomo ran on ‘I’m going to change the culture of New York and we’re not going to be the most unfriendly business state in the country.’ And I think in respect to this issue, he gets it.”

Ships carry ballast water to maintain stability while under way.

Aiming to keep foreign invasive species out of New York waters, the state Department of Environmental Conservation in 2008 adopted a set of ballast discharge standards that are 100 times stronger than the International Maritime Organization’s standards for ships built before 2013 and 1,000 times stronger for ships built after Jan. 1, 2013.

“The International Maritime Organization standard — that’s the standard that Canada uses, that’s the standard the world uses, that’s the standard that everybody uses. But that’s not good enough for the state of New York,” Mr. Johnson said. “A study was done by leading scientists this summer saying that no way is that standard achievable. The only thing achievable is the IMO standards. Well, that didn’t seem to budge the DEC much. Science be damned.”

Last year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board found that New York’s strict standard cannot be met by existing ballast water management systems.

With a year left until the new purity standards go into effect, Seaway officials and fellow critics — shipping companies, the Canadian government and governors of Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin — continue to protest the rules that they argue would “shut down” New York’s Seaway, the entrance into the greater Great Lakes shipping system.

“If you put your rules in and shut down the Seaway, what would that mean? That’s 72,000 jobs and $14 billion a year in economic impact,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to a 2011 economic impact study.

The study, conducted by Martin Associates, of Lancaster, Pa., found that Seaway maritime commerce in New York waters supported 72,601 U.S. and Canadian jobs, $3.8 billion in personal income, $10.5 billion in business revenue and $1.4 billion in local, state and federal taxes in 2010 alone.

But as far as Great Lakes-area environmentalists are concerned, the shipping industry and the Seaway are “getting in the way of doing the right thing.”

Jennifer J. Caddick, executive director of Save the River, Clayton, said the real problem is the shipping industry’s unwillingness to invest in the costly treatment systems — which are said to cost around $2 million to $3 million per setup — and failure to acknowledge the value of protecting the state’s drinking water.

“I certainly hope the governor supports his agencies, supports the DEC and help it protect our waterways,” she said. “As far as I can tell, the DEC has been willing to work with industries and help them with technical issues. And there are mechanisms in the rule that allow ship operators to extend the deadline.”

The state has already postponed the requirement’s initial effective date of 2012 by a full year and several shippers have applied for extensions.

Ms. Caddick said existing regulations do help limit the introduction of invasive species into the Great Lakes, but tougher ballast purity standards are needed to ensure that no unwanted organisms enter the system in the future.

Still, Seaway officials seem confident that the current ballast treatment program, which has ballast tanks flushed with salt water outside the Seaway to kill organisms and inspected at Montreal, stops invasive species from entering the Seaway.

“The good news is that because of our program, with the flushing and everything, there haven’t been any new invasive species introduced into the system in six years,” Mr. Johnson said. ”My sense is that we will probably know how the Cuomo administration is going to deal with this fairly quickly.”