The International Joint Commission (IJC) recently announced that it has appointed a 16-member public advisory group to help identify potential improvements to the regulation of Lake Ontario outflows.
The advisory group will assist the IJC’s Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Adaptive Management (GLAM) Committee with an expedited review of Plan 2014, the plan for regulating outflows that took effect in 2017. The IJC directed the GLAM Committee to conduct the expedited review in response to public concerns over Plan 2014 following the extreme wet conditions that caused record floods in two of the first three years after the plan was adopted.
The advisors will help the committee seek potential improvements to regulation by contributing knowledge about water level impacts and input on the assessment methods used in the review. Advisory group members have also been asked to help foster a two-way dialogue between the committee and affected interests and constituencies, and to seek broader public comment.
The GLAM committee prioritized activities in a two-phase approach that formally began in February 2020. The first phase of the expedited review, expected to last approximately 18 months, focuses on providing information to the IJC’s International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board (Board) during this ongoing period of near-record high inflows to Lake Ontario from Lake Erie.
For a complete list of the Canadian and US advisory group members, click here.
