A government-funded article circulating on the Internet reports that people living on the Lake Michigan shoreline aren't interested in exploring what it would take to restore the lake to its historical level.

Never mind the century-long navigational dredging that has dramatically changed the flow of the St. Clair River, which drains water from Lakes Michigan and Huron toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Never mind that public hearings around the region concluded months ago there was plenty of interest in having the Canadian and U.S. governments explore how to fix the St. Clair.

Never mind that the lake is within about a foot of its all-time low for this time of year.

"Lake Michiganders Don't Want to See Water Levels Raised" proclaims a headline on a story written by a former Michigan newspaper reporter now paid to spread the message of a study board hired by the International Joint Commission to determine the causes behind the low water levels.

The commission is a binational board that oversees U.S. and Canadian boundary waters issues.

The study board concluded more than a year ago that unexpected erosion on the St. Clair River had dropped the long-term averages of Michigan and Huron by up to five inches since a 1960s St. Clair River dredging project.

That water loss was in addition to a whopping 16-inch loss tied to dredging projects stretching back into the 1800s.

Nevertheless, the study board concluded nothing should be done about it.

The Joint Commission disagreed.

After a series of public hearings on the issue last year, four months ago it directed the study board to look at what it might take to bring lake levels back up, and what consequences that might have on property owners, marinas, shippers and the environment. That report is due later this year.

But at the same time work is being done, the study board's public relations arm sent out the headline that this is something the public just isn't interested in.

The story is based on about two dozen letters the Joint Commission recently received from a shorefront property owners group called the Great Lakes Coalition, many of whom have concluded a higher Lake Michigan is not in their best interest because it could trigger shorefront erosion.

"Over the past couple of weeks, the (Joint Commission) received more than two dozen unsolicited comments from (Great Lakes Coalition) members, so we thought it made sense to post them along with an article about them," explained John Nevin, spokesman for the Study Board.

The comments were in fact solicited by a member of the Study Board's own advisory group, who is also chairman of the Great Lakes Coalition.

Nevin defended what he called a "blog post," but what author Jeff Kart called a "story" and what Joint Commission spokesman Frank Bevacqua referred to as an "article."

"This is all a part of our strategy to increase engagement and involvement with the public and interested organizations throughout the Great Lakes," Nevin said.

Others had another word for it.

"This whole thing is so strange," said Melinda Koslow of the National Wildlife Federation. "It seems like they're trying to conjure emotion instead of keeping the study focused on science."

Far from natural

The article, posted on the study board's own website and circulated through a mass e-mailing, states that the majority of the letter writers just want the government to "Leave Mother Nature Alone."

But the St. Clair River today is far from a "natural" waterway.

It was dredged three times during the last century in the name of commercial navigation. Each time, the U.S. government authorized construction of some sort of underwater dam-like structure to compensate for the lake-lowering effect an artificially expanded river channel has on the two Great Lakes - Michigan and Huron - that feed it.

That work was never done. Not in 1920 when the St. Clair shipping channel was dredged to 21 feet. Not in 1933 when it was dredged to 25 feet. And not in the 1960s when it was dredged to 27 feet.

The net result of these projects and other riverbed tinkering, such as sand and gravel mining, and the subsequent failure to compensate for it, is a permanent loss in the long-term averages of Lakes Michigan and Huron levels of about 16 inches.

In recent years, worries surfaced that the loss was substantially larger based on a theory that the Army Corps of Engineers' dredging project in the 1960s scraped through the durable river bottom into soft sediments, unleashing an uncontrollable erosion problem that was essentially draining the lakes.

The theory was pushed by a group of Canadian property owners worried about how low water was affecting their property values.

The Joint Commission responded by hiring the study board, led by an Army Corps employee, to get to the bottom of the question.

The study board ultimately concluded that erosion since the 1960s had lowered the lakes an additional 3 to 5 inches, but the erosion was not linked to the 1960s dredging, and had since stopped.

The study board concluded the lakes, therefore, are no longer draining away and it recommended to the Joint Commission that it do nothing at this time to restore the lost water.

In disagreeing, the Joint Commission asked the study board to examine raising the lakes under several scenarios, including:

• By 3.9 inches to compensate for the water mysteriously lost to erosion since the 1960s dredging.

• By 9.8 inches to compensate for the recent erosion plus water lost due directly to the 1960s dredging.

• By 15.7 inches to compensate for the recent erosion plus all other water lost due to channel dredging since 1906.

• By 20 inches to compensate for the recent erosion plus all human meddling in the St. Clair River dating back to the mid-1850s.

In the newly circulating study board story, the president of the Great Lakes Coalition is quoted as saying that the Joint Commission decided to explore restoring lake levels because it was being influenced by the group of Canadian property owners.

"Why did the (Joint Commission) make this request?" asked Roger J. Smithe. "Because they received lots of letters from Georgian Bay folks asking them to, and they are being responsive to them. They received very few letters from Lake Michigan people."

Joint Commission spokesman Bevacqua had a different explanation.

"The commissioners carefully considered a wide range of views and circumstances before deciding that the second phase of the study should investigate, in an exploratory fashion, scenarios that would restore water levels on lakes Michigan and Huron," Bevacqua said.

"These included, among others, concerns related to economic impacts from high and low water on Lake Michigan as well as Lake Huron, environmental impacts throughout the system including Lake Erie, the fact that (the U.S. and Canadian) governments did not restore water levels after deepening the connecting channels in the past, the equity of restoring levels now or in the future, and potential future impacts related to climate change."

History of controversy

The study board's findings have been shaded with controversy since they were initially released to the public nearly two years ago.

• Upon its release in spring 2009, study team leader Eugene Stakhiv dismissed any questions of the appropriateness of putting an Army Corps employee in charge of investigating an alleged Army Corps problem. He replied that any questions of a conflict of interest were unfounded because the entire study had been independently peer reviewed. The Journal Sentinel subsequently learned that at the time Stakhiv made the statement, the study had in fact not been externally peer reviewed.

• Study leaders also said at the time they released their study that they could not recommend a fix in the river because they had determined the erosion was likely caused by a natural event - an ice jam - and that the Joint Commission had told them no fix could be explored unless the study determined the loss was human-caused.

Nobody at the Joint Commission could provide documentation of that directive, and later the study board said it was actually told the opposite by the Joint Commission - that the cause of the erosion should not factor into any decision whether to explore building some type of structure in the river.

The study board later backed off its theory that the ice jam triggered the erosion, ultimately concluding it did not know what caused it.

Even so, the study team leaders deemed a 3- to 5-inch loss not significant enough to warrant exploring a fix, though they could not say what amount would trigger such a decision.

• The study team commissioned and received a separate report that contradicted its findings that erosion had caused an additional drop of 3 to 5 inches. The separate report said the amount was closer to 9 inches. That report was not released to the public for nearly three months and when it finally was, the study leaders dismissed the findings even as an outside expert contacted by the Journal Sentinel did not.

While the science behind the research that went into the study is exceedingly complicated and difficult for the public to grasp, conservation groups that had their own experts review its data say they are left with doubts about the study's conclusions.

And those doubts are not waning.

Koslow, who also has plenty of doubts about the wisdom of somehow plugging the river to restore lake levels, said she just wants to see the study board conduct the science it's been charged to do. Then, she says, the debate can proceed about whether to construct some sort of structure on the St. Clair River.

Koslow said when she received the e-mail she thought at first she was receiving straight-up news.

"That's one of the problems with journalism today," she said. "What is real?"