Ballast water discharges are critical to the safe operation of vessels.  The maritime industry has established best management practices and technical innovations to ensure the Great Lakes ecosystem is protected.  Great Lakes stakeholders pushed for a better way to regulate ship discharges other than the Vessel General Permit (VGP) and individual State regulations.  The Vessel Incidental Discharge Act (VIDA) empowered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) to establish uniform federal vessel discharge requirements.

Section 27 of the 1920 Merchant Marine Act, generally referred to as the Jones Act, mandates that all cargo moving between U.S. points be carried in vessels that are crewed by, built by, and owned by Americans. Other laws and statutes apply the same ground rules to carrying passengers, towing, dredging, and salvaging in U.S. waters.

The U.S. is far from unique in reserving its domestic waterborne commerce to its domestic fleets. Eighty percent of the world’s coastlines of United Nations shipping nations have similar cabotage laws for their domestic maritime commerce.

The navigational locks at the Soo connect Lake Superior to the lower four Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and international markets. Eighty million tons of cargo, valued at $6 billion and supporting 123,000 jobs, transit the Soo Locks each year. The locks allow cargoes like iron ore and grain to move from mines and farms to customers in the U.S., Canada, and overseas as well as allowing domestic and overseas cargoes to move “up the system” and into upper Midwest markets.

Once again Great Lakes shipping suffered significant delays in late 2022 due to ice and a lack of USCG icebreakers. Just as the season was closing for the year a massive cold front swept through the Great Lakes Christmas week. The result was a rapid freeze of the western basin of Lake Erie which caused an ice plug to form in the Detroit River and shutdown shipping traffic for almost a week. Over the past ten years, the lack of adequate icebreaking on the Great Lakes has caused the loss of over 10,000 jobs and $2 billion to the economy.  In addition, ice jam flooding in the Great Lakes region has become extreme due to more frequent polar vortexes.

The maritime industry is facing an increasing shortage of licensed merchant mariners with profound commercial and national security implications. Since 1874, America’s State Maritime Academies have been educating and training cadets for licensed officer positions in the United States Merchant Marine. State Maritime Academies, including the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, produce 70 percent of all new licensed officers in the United States and are the largest source of newly licensed officers in the country.

A number of new short-distance shipping services have been proposed in the Great Lakes region. In each case, the goal has been to relieve highway or border congestion and move commerce more efficiently. New short sea shipping services on the Great Lakes are likely to take the form of truck ferries and feeder services.

Great Lakes shipyards are fully capable of building all types of commercial and military vessels for service throughout the world, limited only by the size of the navigational locks in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Within the Great Lakes, shipyards have built 1,000-foot-long vessels that keep the mills supplying steel for U.S.-made automobiles and appliances, the lights on in southeast Michigan, and U.S. workers building America’s infrastructure.

Decades of inadequate funding for dredging the Great Lakes have left more than 13 million cubic yards of sediment clogging ports and waterways. Sediment on the bottom means cargoes are left at the dock when vessels can not load to the design depths of the system. This can be as much as 270 tons of iron ore on a U.S.-flag vessel for each inch lost when channels are not adequately dredged. The foreign-flag vessels frequenting the Lakes can forfeit 116 tons for each inch of draft lost.