Posted on April 14, 2025
GRAND HAVEN, MI — Bulk freighters regularly delight onlookers as they pass between the Grand Haven pierheads to deliver limestone, slag and trap rock needed to make concrete and asphalt for Michigan road construction.
Those freighters need a harbor channel deep enough to reach the Verplank Dock up the Grand River in Ferrysburg, where the bulk aggregates are unloaded into large piles.
But Grand Haven’s inner harbor isn’t getting dredged this fall after the federal government balked at new pollution testing required by the state, which is concerned that sediment dredged from more than a dozen Michigan harbors may inadvertently contaminate drinking water supplies depending on where it ultimately ends up being deposited.
On March 26, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected an internal request for funding to test Grand Haven harbor sediment for PFAS, a class of toxic chemicals which state regulators have spent nearly a decade aggressively testing for around Michigan.
The Army Corps says PFAS testing in Grand Haven and elsewhere threatens to drive up dredging costs if the sediment is toxic enough to require landfilling.
Congressional Republicans weighed into the matter on April 1 when U.S. Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., blasted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over the “harbor-killing mandate” and faulted the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) for impeding the movement of cargos through poorly defined testing parameters.
In Grand Haven, harbor businesses say the dredging delay threatens to drive up road construction costs if cargo deliveries cost more because ships can’t float-in as much material. The harbor was supposed to be dredged last fall and shippers are concerned that sediment shoaling may prevent a delivery.
The Army Corps now plans to dredge Grand Haven next year.
“You know, our governor has been very pro-road, and yet the division of EGLE that’s working for her doesn’t even understand that they just kind of caused a huge bump in her agenda,” said Ron Mathews, CEO of Verplank Family Holding Co.
Dredging cost scare in Menominee
While Whitmer was in Washington, D.C. on April 9 to meet President Donald Trump at the White House, EGLE and the Army Corps met to discuss the testing kerfuffle.
Nick Zager, chief of operations for the Army Corps Detroit District, called the meeting “productive” and said the district plans to ask for Grand Haven testing funds again.
Sediment testing is nothing new for the Army Corps, but PFAS isn’t part of the typical list of legacy contaminants sampled for in harbor sediments and Zager said the Corps initially misunderstood the way EGLE wanted it measured.
After the meeting Wednesday, “it was clear that that the criteria is there, but it needed to be put in a framework of dredging rather than water quality,” he said. “We all thought they literally had to develop new standards and that that’s not the case.”
The state has been creating guidance since last fall on how the Army Corps can go about testing. According to EGLE, 17 of the 69 navigation channels in Michigan maintained by the Army Corps are either close enough to one of the state’s more than 300 known PFAS sources, or have high enough contaminant levels in the ambient surface water to warrant testing.
Those include the Clinton and Detroit rivers, and harbors in Alpena, Port Huron, St. Clair, Grand Haven, Holland, Manistee, Menominee, Monroe, Saginaw, South Haven and St. Joseph.
Outer harbor sediments in Michigan are mostly sand that Army Corp contractors use to build beaches. The state’s concern is with inner harbors, where tributary currents deposit sediments which are finer grain silts that PFAS molecules can cling to.
While the federal government is responsible for maintaining navigable harbors for shipping, the state owns Great Lakes harbor bottomlands and has authority require dredging projects meet water quality standards under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act through a certification process.
“We don’t want dredge material placed in a way that it’s going to create a contaminated site that then is required to be cleaned up,” said Gillian Gainsley, EGLE chief of staff.
Gainsley said EGLE became authorized to require sediment testing for PFAS in 2020, but the agency did not ask the Army Corps to test harbor bottoms until a couple years ago.
In early 2024 at the request of Wisconsin and Michigan, the Army Corp tested sediments in Menominee as part of a larger feasibility study to deepen the harbor. An initial Menominee cost workup sparked alarm after what Zager described as a “worst case scenario” estimation raised the total project cost from $38 million to more than $187 million.
The biggest cost factor was potentially landfilling those sediments, which would involve tipping fees on trucking 500,000 cubic yards of slop inland for disposal rather than dumping the material out in the open waters of Lake Michigan, Zager said.
Thankfully, Zager said test results show only about 4 percent of Menominee harbor sediments might be affected rather than the 20 percent the Army Corp assumed, and it’s possible that material could simply be avoided by dredges altogether.
“That’s going to drive the cost back down,” Zager said.
“It isn’t anywhere near the threat to navigation that we initially thought it was,” he said.
What happens if a harbor is severely contaminated?
Thus far, Grand Haven is the only Michigan dredging project delayed thanks to a schedule that allows EGLE and the Army Corps time to finalize testing parameters.
Other harbors on the list aren’t scheduled for dredging until 2026.
However, Zager said the possibility remains that harbor testing in Grand Haven or elsewhere in Michigan might turn up PFAS at concentrations which are cost-prohibitive to dredge around or remediate — potentially threatening that harbor’s future.
“If we look at these harbors and they have a lot of hot spots for PFAS, it could ultimately mean that we don’t have the economic justification to dredge that harbor anymore — or at least large portions of the harbor,” Zager said.
Huizenga, who blasted the state prior to EGLE’s meeting with the Army Corp, did not provide further input when contacted by MLive. In a March 28 letter to Whitmer, Huizenga said he was initially told that the testing requirement stemmed from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s addition of PFAS chemicals to the list of regulated hazardous substances.
In St. Joseph, harbormaster Michael Moran said about 50 ships deliver bulk cargos each year and he’s optimistic dredging will take place as scheduled in 2026.
“We just want to balance environmental responsibility with getting our commercial shipping in,” Moran said. “Hopefully we can continue to get dredging done.”
At Verplank in Grand Haven, Mathews remains worried that drawn-out Army Corps bidding and contracting schedules coupled with constraints such as prohibitions on dredging during fish spawning and other unknowns may pose a challenge.
He hopes PFAS testing procedures are sorted out before there’s any impact to dredging on major connecting channels.
“If the Detroit River gets too shallow, iron ore from Duluth doesn’t get to Cleveland anymore and then the steel industry will be affected,” he said.
“Then people will really pay attention.”
