In a telling news story of the times, the Lake Champlain Basin monitoring program nearly lost its funding and narrowly avoided being shut down. The program has received earmarked congressional funding for NOAA and the USGS to run monitoring stations through the efforts of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), which has recently been closed as a funding option. Leahy and leaders of the Lake Champlain Basin Program were able to find enough funding through other channels to keep the system running through this year, with work underway to find sustainable sources of funds for the long run.
More background about the benefits of this program are provided in this story from the Burlington Free Press, where the network has been credited with reducing damages after Tropical Storm Irene, and providing a very important data source for the cleanup of Lake Champlain. The ability to closely monitor both pollutants and water flow is a critical measure to understand the load of pollution reaching the lake. The scientific value of this monitoring is at stake with a potential reduction in stations or through a loss of stations. Both New York and Vermont state governments are looking at ways they might fill the budget gap.
