There’s a couple of good stories out there today for those of us who live near the Great Lakes.

First, the House of Representatives approved the Great Lakes Compact yesterday, and the bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law. It’s a tremendous step towards protecting the waters of the Great Lakes for all the states and provinces that border on them.

Second, on a more local Minnesota note, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has decide to not wait for the EPA to get its act together and will begin regulating the discharge of ballast water into Lake Superior on their own.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Authority (MPCA) citizen board voted 6-0 to move ahead with regulations on discharge of untreated ballast in state waters on Tuesday. The new rules put in place a permitting process for ballast discharges in Lake Superior and require ships to clean and treat their ballasts before entering the lake by 2016.

Ballast is water taken on in a port of call to stabilize a ship and later discharged in a different port of call. It is estimated that ballast discharge from oceangoing vessels, known regionally as “salties,” has introduced as many as 180 invasive species to the Great Lakes ecosystem and beyond.

The EPA, of course, opposes any state setting up their own regulating system, but when you’ve refused to act until a court ordered you to actually fulfill your obligation to protect the water of the Great Lakes and its environmental integrity, it’s really not that big a surprise that other agencies would feel they had to step in and make sure it’s done right.