Governor Pritzker signs federal and state agreement to protect Lake Michigan from invasive carp

After months of back and forth, officials announced on July 1 that Illinois had signed a partnership agreement that would allow it to begin construction on the $1.15 billion Brandon Road Interbasin Project, with significant federal funding.

The decades-long project is designed to be the last, multi-layered line of defense to prevent invasive silver carp and bighead carp from entering Lake Michigan, where they pose a threat to Great Lakes ecosystems and the multi-billion dollar fishing and boating industries.

The announcement comes after experts and advocates spent weeks urging Governor JB Pritzker to meet the June 30 deadline so $274 million in federal funds would not be lost and construction workers could take advantage of the upcoming scheduled closure of the lock and dam in Joliet.

Further delays could have led to an irreversible disaster if the carp had migrated further upstream in Illinois waters and breached the electrical barriers in Romeoville, they said. If the agreement had not been signed, the Rock Island District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – which oversees the project – would not have been able to provide more resources for pre-construction planning and engineering.

“Protecting the Great Lakes has always been and will always be a priority for the state of Illinois, and after many years of successive administrations stalling this project, I am very pleased to see it now moving forward,” Pritzker said in a press release.

“Protecting the Great Lakes is not a task that any one state or city can accomplish alone, and I am delighted that we have been able to find a way to both protect the Great Lakes and ensure that Illinois taxpayers do not have to bear a disproportionate share of the burden.”

The project has been awaiting approval from Illinois for a year after the Michigan legislature approved $64 million in funding in June 2023. Those funds, plus $50 million from Illinois, will cover the project’s required $114 million non-federal cost share.

“Complex agreements like this do not happen in a vacuum, nor do they happen quickly,” said Natalie Phelps Finnie, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “A tremendous amount of work went into working out the details of this agreement over many months. I am thrilled that this important project can now move forward.”

In a virtual press conference in mid-June that brought together a group of local politicians, stakeholders and experts to urge the governor to act quickly, Illinois Environmental Council Executive Director Jennifer Walling said approving the project was an opportunity for Pritzker to secure his reputation as a “champion” of the Great Lakes and a “key intergovernmental partner” of Michigan.

U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, who supported the project and helped secure state funding, urged Pritzker to approve the project in a June 25 letter.

“You have expressed concerns about Illinois assuming sole responsibility for a project that benefits the entire Great Lakes region, and we understand and share those concerns,” the letter said.

The federal government will cover 90 percent of the costs associated with building the Brandon Road Interbasin Project, and just last month Illinois state senators announced they had pushed through an increase in the federal share of costs for operations and maintenance after completion to 90 percent as well.

Illinois and Michigan have also entered into a separate agreement to ensure that any additional costs incurred as the project continues will be shared and that taxpayers in both states will not be disproportionately burdened, the governor’s office said.

Concerns about land acquisition and real estate at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam have been a major obstacle, as the private land along the riverbank required for construction is likely contaminated by a former coal-fired power plant.

Last year, experts told the Tribune that negotiations would be complex. The state was reluctant to buy the property from the energy company NRG, which owns it and has responsibility for ensuring it is free of contaminants before handing it over to the federal government. But officials did not say how or if those concerns were ultimately resolved.

Following the signing of the agreement, contracts for construction, further planning and rock removal will be obtained from interested parties in the coming weeks.

The innovative, multi-faceted plan to install a “gantlet” or layered system at a “critical chokepoint” in the Des Plaines River emerged from a multi-year collaboration between scientists, engineers and partners from numerous U.S., Canadian and Indigenous agencies around the Great Lakes.

Invasive carp, particularly silver carp and bighead carp, pose a particular threat to aquatic life due to their large numbers and reproductive capacity. When they reach a new stream, river, lake or other location bordered by water, such as wetlands, they can easily displace and starve native fish and mussels by eating all the plankton from the bottom of the food chain.

Under the project, as silver carp and bighead carp approach the lock and dam in Joliet, they will first encounter an acoustic deterrent and an air bubble curtain. The bubbles will act as a physical barrier and also remove small fish trapped under barges or swept in their wake.

The fish that make it through this curtain will then swim through a man-made channel that runs the entire length of the current lock. At the end, stubborn carp will encounter an electric barrier like the one in Romeoville. After that, the carp will be kept at bay by a series of acoustic deterrents that use painful sound waves. On the other side, any remaining fish larvae and eggs will be sent back downstream through a flushing lock.

“Today’s agreement will help us begin construction on the critical Brandon Road project as soon as possible,” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said on July 1. “The Great Lakes are the heart of Michigan’s economy, and Brandon Road will help us protect local communities and key industries, including fishing and boatbuilding, that support tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.”

In a July 1 press release, the Alliance for the Great Lakes praised the agreement, calling it a milestone.

“The signing of the Brandon Road Project Agreement is historic and will help protect our fisheries, our economy and our quality of life,” said Marc Smith, policy director for the National Wildlife Federation. “Keeping invasive carp out of the Great Lakes is a national priority.”

Since invasive carp were introduced to the country in 1963 and escaped into the Mississippi Basin during floods in the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of other states have struggled with the devastating effects they wreak on aquatic ecosystems. Silver carp and bighead carp have no natural predators in American waters and probably never will, meaning their populations can grow unchecked.

In recent years, as the fish have continued to spread throughout the state’s waters, Illinois residents, dissatisfied with the pace of state and federal deterrence plans, have taken matters into their own hands.

Some efforts focus on overfishing: The Village of Bath’s Original Redneck Fishing Tournament pits amateurs and experienced anglers against each other in an annual competition; commercial fishermen, or “carp cowboys,” round up fish elsewhere in the Illinois River; and state biologists have directed large-scale removal operations that have caught hundreds of thousands of pounds of carp in a single day.

Other creative ventures include using unmanned kayaks to collect information on large carp populations and attempts to create a market for the fish as a food source by renaming it “copi” and preparing it into tacos, nuggets, empanadas and sliders.

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