There was a lot of optimism in 2018 when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced state support for projects to help local governments deal with harmful algal blooms.

The announcement came with a flurry of activity – an online HAB map, four community forums in communities that had been affected by harmful algal blooms and promises of grant funding. The grant funding is still flowing, but it has felt as if Cuomo’s grand 2018 gesture had somewhat faded as other matters took up the state’s attention.

That’s why the late March announcement that the state Department of Environmental Conservation is taking new steps to guide HAB management across the state felt important, even if some of the actual steps are pretty mundane. The six-point roadmap includes monitoring and assessment, identifying HAB parameters and developing regulatory guidelines if needed, expanding and developing additional clean water planning mechanisms and programs to reduce HABs and their impacts, research to better understand HABs and responses; and additional public outreach and reporting.

DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton has set a five-year goal for the process to play out. Meeting that five-year time frame will take more follow-through than we’ve seen from the state in the past.

We’ve been researching harmful algal blooms on Chautauqua Lake for years, with the state’s support. We’ve been taking actions to reduce phosphorus that makes its way into Chautauqua Lake – though sometimes our actions are like taking a shot glass of sugar out of a bucket of water. Those projects are also state-supported. But we all know that perhaps the most important thing we can do is to reduce the amount of phosphorus that is already in Chautauqua Lake. Rather than dealing with phosphorus with the proverbial shot glass, we need to start dealing with phosphorus with a coffee cup.

The language is hard to get excited about. But we hope that after the excitement Cuomo generated almost a decade ago that a mundane announcement from the DEC leads to real advancement in our understanding of harmful algal blooms and, just as important, helps us come up with better methods of dealing with them.