In February 1998, Congress passed what should have been an uncontroversial bill. It renewed funding for research in coastal areas and the Great Lakes. But buried within the bill was language that designated Lake Champlain as the sixth Great Lake.
The change quickly made national headlines, and Midwesterners took notice. They were shocked and outraged. Lake Champlain is long, skinny, and pretty small — only 435 square miles. It just didn’t measure up to the other Great Lakes.
“To add a little lake that’s one sixteenth the size of the smallest Great Lake is just crazy,” said Fred Upton, a congressman from Michigan at the time. He also called it a “pencil line on a map” and said, “I heard you could practically pitch a baseball across it.”
The Great Lakes members of Congress moved quickly to amend this bill. They didn’t want another lake to join the core five, and they wouldn’t go down without a fight. Lake Champlain was a good lake, but it wasn’t a Great Lake.
Credits:
Producer: Ruth Abramovitz
Editor: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Dan Wanschura, Ellie Katz, Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Host: Dan Wanschura
Special thanks: Lexi Krupp, Bob Kinzel, Lydia Slauson, Marcelle Leahy, Mark Breederland, Tom Crane, Mike Donahue, Dave Dempsey, Kris Stepenuck, Rochelle Sturtevant, Marc Gaden, Luke Albee, and Brendan Banaszak.
Radio excerpts in this episode were originally broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition”. TV excerpts from “NBC Nightly News”.
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
More than 25 years ago, back in 1998, Tom Berry had a job in politics in Vermont. It was late February, when out of the blue, Tom got a call from back home in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
TOM BERRY: My mother called … and asked me, ‘What's up with Lake Champlain thinking it could be a Great Lake? There's only five Great Lakes and Lake Champlain's not one of 'em.’
WANSCHURA: Tom was completely caught off guard. He hadn’t heard anything about this from his colleagues in government. So he was even more surprised to be getting the news from his mom.
BERRY: And she said, ‘Well, one of the Vermont senators just made it a Great Lake, and it's not a Great Lake.’
WANSCHURA: What Tom didn’t know then was Congress had just passed a bill designating Lake Champlain as one of the Great Lakes. It was quickly becoming this huge national story, like on NBC Nightly News.
LISA MURROW: Congress wants to create a new Great Lake. A sixth one. Read between the lines of this bill—the president is about to sign it—and you will find language to designate a new Great Lake.
WANSCHURA: Tom’s mother wasn’t alone in her outrage. All over the Midwest, fifth graders, editorial boards, and members of Congress pushed back against this new Great Lake. It seemed sort of ridiculous. Lake Champlain is way smaller than all the other Great Lakes. It’s this long, skinny lake tucked between New York, Vermont, and Quebec. Even Lake Ontario, the smallest Great Lake, makes Champlain look like a swimming pool. It’s over 16 times bigger than Lake Champlain.
DAVIS HELBERG: We have islands in the Great Lakes larger than Lake Champlain.
WANSCHURA: That’s Davis Helberg talking to NPR. He was the port director in Duluth, Minnesota.
HELBERG: We have these thousand foot lakers that carry iron ore and coal within the Great Lakes. A thousand feet long, carry about 65,000 tons. I suppose when one of these retires, we could donate it to Lake Champlain and they could make a bridge out of it.
WANSCHURA: Congress members from the Great Lakes states were quick to chime in too.
FRED UPTON: To add a little lake that’s one sixteenth the size of the smallest Great Lake is just crazy.
WANSCHURA: That’s Fred Upton, a congressman from Michigan at the time. He also described Lake Champlain as a “pencil line on a map.” Ohio Representative Steve LaTourette piled on too, telling reporters, “If Lake Champlain ends up as a Great Lake, I propose we rename it ‘Lake Plain Sham.’”
So, if Lake Champlain was not on par with the fab five, how did this all happen? Ruth Abramovitz picks up the story right after this.
RUTH ABRAMOVITZ, BYLINE: This all started with one of Lake Champlain’s biggest advocates, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. By 1998, Leahy already loomed large in the Senate. He had been in office for more than two decades, and he chaired and held seats on some of the most powerful committees. He also literally loomed large. Leahy is 6’2. His imposing frame, furrowed eyebrows, and white hair were super recognizable. Leahy knew that Lake Champlain was in trouble.
PATRICK LEAHY: I wanted to make sure we were protecting the lake, which is a beautiful spot, but faces all of these environmental pressures.
ABRAMOVITZ: Senator Leahy tells me this from his kitchen in Burlington. I can see Lake Champlain through the window behind him. Great or not, it’s a brilliant shade of blue. He’s 85 now. He retired from the Senate a few years ago, after 48 years in office.
LEAHY: I wanted to make sure I had a lake that wasn't falling into the pollution that we saw in a couple of the Great Lakes.
ABRAMOVITZ: In both the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, agricultural runoff was causing a buildup of phosphorus in the water. This led to harmful algal blooms and threatened aquatic life. And zebra mussels, sea lamprey, and other invasive species had arrived in Lake Champlain.
SUSANNE FLEEK-GREEN: Senator Leahy was really focused on ways to increase both scientific research that went into cleaning up Lake Champlain, as well as the actual cleaning up of Lake Champlain.
ABRAMOVITZ: That’s Susanne Fleek-Green, a legislative assistant to Leahy who worked on environmental issues.
FLEEK-GREEN: He really, you know, looked at every agency and tried to find ways to help Lake Champlain.
ABRAMOVITZ: The lake brought billions of dollars to Vermont and New York through tourism and fishing each year. It also provided hundreds of thousands of residents with clean drinking water. If Lake Champlain fell into ecological disaster, it wouldn’t just harm the species in the lake. It would harm Vermonters. But there was a solution. A federal program to fight these problems already existed.
(montage of individuals saying “sea grant”)
ABRAMOVITZ: The National Sea Grant Program had been around since 1966. It funded ecological research in coastal areas and the Great Lakes. They were tackling those issues with invasive species and runoff, among other things.
FLEEK-GREEN: The University of Vermont, said, ‘Hey, it would be great if we too, could be part of the Sea Grant program,’ especially because they worked on a lot of the same invasive species issues that occurred in the Great Lakes.
ABRAMOVITZ: In late 1997, Susanne went to work.
FLEEK-GREEN: We knew that the Sea Grant reauthorization bill was bubbling at the Commerce Committee. … And so we started talking to … staff on the committee about how to add UVM as a Sea Grant program.
ABRAMOVITZ: Reauthorization of the program only happened every couple of years. This was their best shot at including Lake Champlain.
FLEEK-GREEN: You know, like in any legislative process, we went back and forth a little bit to see if that was the best approach.
ABRAMOVITZ: They wanted to get this done while the bill was still being polished in committee. Before it went to the full Senate for a vote.
LEAHY: The only way we could do it initially, because the bill was about to go to the floor, was just add it on to the Great Lakes designation.
ABRAMOVITZ: So, Senator Patrick Leahy added in a brief line. It read, “The term Great Lakes includes Lake Champlain.” Tom Berry, the guy whose mom called him, later worked as a staffer for Leahy. According to Tom, this was a classic move from Leahy’s playbook.
TOM: It's just something that the senator was able to do, I think sort of at the 11th hour during a committee markup, which is often how he liked to get significant, uh, work done. … Just an extra line of language here or there, not completely remaking the bill, could have a dramatic impact on Vermont.
ABRAMOVITZ: The Sea Grant bill made it to the full Senate, amendment and all. Compared with a lot of bills in Congress, this one was pretty unremarkable. It was a bill reauthorizing an uncontroversial program. In fact, it didn’t even come to a full, recorded vote in either chamber. Instead, it went through legislative shortcuts used to pass boring bills. So in both the Senate and the House, the bill passed super easily, without any disruption or complaints from the Midwest legislators.
As the media storm brewed, President Bill Clinton signed the Sea Grant bill into law. On March 6, 1998, there were six Great Lakes. Leahy’s office put out a press release celebrating this win for Vermont. It noted that Lake Champlain was now one of the Greats.
LEAHY: I had people come up to me in the Capitol, “Oh, we saw a picture out of Lake Champlain. My, that's beautiful.” I had a number of people bring newspapers wanting me to sign the newspaper. I’d never had an experience like that.
ABRAMOVITZ: This was all welcome news to Ellen Marsden. At the time, she was an assistant professor of wildlife and fisheries biology at the University of Vermont.
ELLEN MARSDEN: The Sea Grant program has always been a very good place to go to for research funding. … So it spelled opportunity for us. Wow. We're already doing work on Lake Champlain. Here's even more opportunity to get that work funded or find funding for it.
ABRAMOVITZ: Ellen and her colleagues saw the attacks on Lake Champlain—like ‘Lake Plain Sham,’ the thousand foot freighter bridge. But, they had a sense of humor about it.
MARSDEN: I remember it and we were, of course, we were glued to the radio and the press and you know, ultimately being slightly miffed, a bit more just chuckling at the different responses.
ABRAMOVITZ: They knew their lake didn’t measure up, but they still felt the need to defend it. Maybe, it should be a Great Lake.
MARSDEN: We wanted to find some statistic that would allow us to sort of hold our own, so to speak. Well we’re certainly not bigger in area, and we’re certainly not bigger in volume. We are actually deeper at the deepest point than Lake Erie, but that's not saying a lot. Lake Erie is very shallow.
ABRAMOVITZ: Okay, it passes the depth test.
MARSDEN: And the one big statistic, of course, is we have a remarkably huge drainage basin… So in the Great Lakes, that ratio of watershed to lake area is about one to one. … In Lake Champlain, that ratio is 18 to one.
ABRAMOVITZ: The Vermonters stuck to these arguments, and said Champlain really was on par with the Great Lakes. Leahy pushed this idea as well. Back in 1998, he told NBC that Vermonters had always considered Lake Champlain the sixth Great Lake.
LEAHY: Lake Champlain has always been one of the Great Lakes in its ecology, its geography, and its origin.
ABRAMOVITZ: So why did the Great Lakes politicians let this happen in the first place? Likely, they weren’t paying much attention to the Sea Grant bill at all.
LEAHY: These were people who basically were embarrassed that they had to tell their constituents, ‘I voted for a bill I never read or didn't understand,’ and I was, I was not gonna push back on them.
UPTON: It missed the attention of everyone.
ABRAMOVITZ: That’s Representative Fred Upton again.
UPTON: You know, we have a lot of bills, pieces of legislation. You rely on staff, you rely on others, you often might have 25 bills up in an hour’s time for a vote on the House floor.
He was worried that this bill could hurt funding for the Great Lakes.
FRED UPTON: When you go from five Great Lakes to six, guess what? The funding gets cut.
ABRAMOVITZ: At first, a Lake Champlain Sea Grant program would take less than 200,000 from a $56 million pot. But, what if Lake Champlain cut into other programs, beyond Sea Grant? And this set a dangerous precedent.
UPTON: It would've been a foot in the door to eventually block us out by adding a sixth. And who knows if someone in someplace else had an idea for a seventh Great Lake or you know, whether it be in Florida or California.
ABRAMOVITZ: The heated backlash coming from the Great Lakes was about funding, but it was also about identity.
CHRIS GILLCRIST: The idea that the Midwest is culturally different from, say the East Coast or the West Coast is really, it's, it's been a long standing tradition.
ABRAMOVITZ: That’s Chris Gillcrist, the director emeritus of the Great Lakes Historical Society. Chris says this attempt to add a sixth Great Lake felt like an affront on the five original lakes and their home states. It was annoying. The Great Lakes region were often victims of bicoastal bias, Chris argues. When it came to federal projects, they always had to fight for attention over the two coasts. Making Lake Champlain a Great Lake on a whim, it felt like just another example of East Coast favoritism.
GILLCRIST: I think it illustrated a lot of things about how people viewed the Great Lakes, and kind of a lack of respect for the history of the Great Lakes and what it had done for this country over 200 years.
ABRAMOVITZ: Even though the bill was signed into law, the fight wasn’t over. The Great Lakes delegation did not want to admit Lake Champlain, and Senator Leahy did not want to lose the funding he had just finessed.
The stage was set for negotiations to begin. In the ring, it was Representative Upton and Michigan’s two senators. They were up against the heavy hitter from Vermont.
UPTON: I felt a little bit like David and Goliath. … Leahy was very distinguished, real white hair, a lot of respect. No skeletons for sure, and well loved and … he was able to get a lot of things done for the state of Vermont.
ABRAMOVITZ: Compared to Leahy, Upton just didn’t have the same stature. And he looked it. He said he would still get carded buying alcohol when he was in Congress.
UPTON: I got tackled once on the house floor by the security folks who, they didn't think I was a member of Congress rushing to vote early in my career. … And, here's this young guy, not even a subcommittee chair, working to take him on.
ABRAMOVITZ: But it wasn’t just the Michigan Congressional delegation negotiating with this titan of the Senate.
UPTON: You know I relied on folks from Wisconsin and Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York. We're all reliant on the Great Lakes. We know the importance of it, whether you live on the Great Lakes, or not.
ABRAMOVITZ: Outside of negotiations, the Midwest had some other tactics.
UPTON: We utilized the press, so NPR covered it as they should.
SCOTT SIMON: Lake Champlain is now a Great Lake. It’s the law. No matter what logic or geography says.
UPTON: And we got some wonderful editorials and headlines in major city papers.
ABRAMOVITZ: The more attention this got, and the more the Midwest outrage made headlines, the better. It would ramp up pressure on Leahy to undo the designation.
LEAHY: I told them quietly, ‘Don't worry, we're gonna fix all this and we're gonna have a bill that you will want to vote for.’
ABRAMOVITZ: 18 days after the bill was signed, Senator Leahy came to the floor with an announcement.
LEAHY: Mr. President, I want to say that I'm pleased to join my colleagues from the Great Lake States today to offer an amendment that clarifies an issue that relates to ecological research involving Lake Champlain and its relatives, the Great Lakes of the Midwest. …The purpose of my earlier amendment was not to change any maps, but to promote ecological research on the common problems facing our lake. I understand the symbolic issue this has become with our friends in the Midwest, and because they are my friends, I do not want to create problems for them. … We've agreed to call Lake Champlain a cousin instead of a little brother to those larger lakes in the Midwest.
ABRAMOVITZ: Under this amendment brought by Leahy and his colleagues from the Midwest, Lake Champlain would no longer be one of the Great Lakes. The amendment didn’t guarantee money for Lake Champlain, but it allowed nearby universities to apply for it. Just like any other college in the Sea Grant program. Looking back, Upton remembers this as a true compromise.
UPTON: The bottom line, of course, was that the Great Lakes still prevailed at five and getting the funding. And Lake Champlain was eligible for Sea Grant money, and he was pretty happy about that too. So it was a win-win for both regions.
ABRAMOVITZ: This new amendment was tacked on to another appropriations bill in the Senate, which passed both chambers of Congress.The national news died down, the dust settled over Vermont, and President Clinton signed the bill into law about six weeks later. Lake Champlain was still a good lake, but not a Great Lake. 27 years later, this footnote in Congressional history has paid off.
LEAHY: I'm looking at future generations of my children and grandchildren, that they'll have a lake, there'll be a clean lake, they can swim in, they can fish in and sail and everything else, and not have to worry about dangerous chemicals and pollution. So it ended up being a win-win for everybody.
ABRAMOVITZ: Despite what he told the press back then, Senator Leahy now says he was never trying to add a sixth Great Lake.
LEAHY: Nobody in Vermont, myself included wanted to rename Lake Champlain as a Great Lake. … I didn't care. They could designate Lake Champlain as Lake X if they wanted, provided we got the research money.
ABRAMOVITZ: But Leahy admits that once the press made it front page news, he had some fun with all the attention.
LEAHY: I realized there were a number of interviews where I was trying unsuccessfully to keep a straight face, like right now.
ABRAMOVITZ: Even years later, Leahy and his colleagues would still rib each other about Lake Champlain. Fred Upton remembers Leahy putting his hand on his shoulder…
UPTON: And he'd give me a little twinkle in his eye. … Said, do you remember when? I said yes, I do. … He said, well, we ended up getting the money. I said, well, that wasn't a problem. As long as it … didn't take away from the Great Lakes. So we laughed about it for years afterward, and Lake Champlain is a good place.
ABRAMOVITZ: For as much as they teased each other, Senator Leahy and the Great Lakes Congress members found a genuine and shared interest in protecting their lakes. They formed a lasting relationship that benefitted both the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.
LEAHY: I wanted to make sure the ecological research and all for the five Great Lakes continued because I think they are a national treasure. … So I wanted 'em to continue to have the research so they can keep clean for, again, thinking of future generations.
ABRAMOVITZ: Each time Sea Grant needed to be renewed, Leahy fought hard to grow the pie, and ensure that no state felt like they were getting cut out. In doing so, Leahy brought home more funding for both the Midwest and the East. For the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain alike.