LANSING – Governor Jennifer Granholm and other Great Lakes governors called Tuesday for a summit at the White House to determine how to address the threat of the Asian carp to the Great Lakes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected motions from the state to close locks connecting the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan.
“The question is how do we quickly get a solution,” Granholm said at a press event this morning. “The only way I know is we need to shut down the locks.”
But she said, despite federal efforts to keep the locks open, the state and federal administration still had the same goal of keeping the invasive carp out of the Great Lakes.
The Supreme Court refused Tuesday morning to issue an injunction in the interstate battle over invasive Asian carp, meaning Chicago won’t be required – for now – to close locks on waterways linking the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan.
The court issued the one-sentence order without commenting on the case and did not address the request by Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox (R) to reopen a decades-old case concerning Chicago’s handling of the waterways. The court will rule later on the merits of the Asian carp case, but no date has been given.
Noah Hall, a Great Lakes expert and professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, said the court’s decision to deny the injunction may have deferred to some extent to U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who showed support for Illinois and the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the locks. Kagan urged the court to deny an injunction in a friend-of-the-court brief, arguing that Michigan had failed to show an imminent threat that would justify the closing of the locks.
Michigan, along with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, argued that multibillion-dollar fishing industries were in danger because Asian carp had breached electric barriers in the waterways and were coming closer to the Great Lakes.
Although tests have found “environmental DNA” from the Asian carp in multiple locations beyond the barriers, one dead Asian carp has turned up in searches of the waterways. Chicago argued that the injunction was unwarranted and would have constrained the shipping industry that relies upon the waterways.
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