Paul Aasen, Advocacy Director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, told a capitol news conference Tuesday that his group and a diverse coalition of groups were pleased with the Clean Water Legacy funding bill that passed out of a key Senate subcommittee.

Aasen said the bill that emerged from the Clean Water Legacy Subcommittee, chaired by White Bear Lake DFLer Sen. Sandy Rummel, follows the framework that the G-16 coalition put together more than three years ago. That framework calls for testing all of the state’s waters, coming up with a plan to clean the lakes and rivers that fail the tests, implementing those plans and then retesting.

“This is a long journey; the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972,” Aasen told the reporters. “We support this bill because it follows the framework.”

Aasen was asked by Rummel to speak at the news conference and was the only speaker who was not a legislator. Other members of the G-16 coalition of business, agriculture, cities, watershed districts, parks and trails and conservation groups stood behind the podium to show their support. Rummel, Sen. Dennis Frederickson, Republican from New Ulm, and Sen. Ellen Anderson, a St. Paul DFLer, all spoke about the bill’s passage.

“There was a mandate in that constitutional amendment,” Rummel said. “Before, funding was uncertain and it was difficult to make long range plans. Those days are past.”

The bill was very similar to the one Frederickson introduced and which MCEA and the other groups supported. Over the next two years, if passed by both houses, the bill would spend $95.1 million on protection, restoration and preservation of the state’s waters, $37.9 million on testing, monitoring and planning, $10.3 million on education, research and tools and $7.6 million on groundwater and drinking water protection and preservation.

 River and lake testing will be done in all 81 major watersheds in the state, over the next 10 years, Rummel said. By comparison, only 20 percent  of the state’s waters have been tested in the 37 years since the Clean Water Act was passed.

“We never had the money before,” Anderson said. “Now we have the money and we know exactly what to do with it.”