By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Environmental Protection Agency program charged with cleaning the Chesapeake Bay has decided to reorganize itself, a spokesman said yesterday, conceding that crucial goals for restoring the bay's health by 2010 are unlikely to be met without far-reaching changes.

Mike Burke, a spokesman for the 23-year-old Chesapeake Bay Program, said leaders want a greater emphasis on "implementation" -- carrying out plans to solve the bay's problems. Environmentalists have long called for that, saying the program spends too much time studying pollution and too little trying to stop it.

Burke said EPA officials were concerned about their ability to meet promises made amid great fanfare in 2000: a bay with far less pollution and far more crabs, oysters and underwater grass.

"There's no way we're going to get to those goals at the current pace," Burke said yesterday. "If we don't dramatically accelerate implementation, then we will not meet those 2010 goals."

In recent months, program officials had begun interviewing state officials, environmentalists and other outsiders to hear their suggestions for changes, Burke said. A workshop on the subject will be held later this fall, he said. In all, he said, it might be a few months before reorganization details are settled.

Burke said it is too early to provide specific examples of how staffing or funding might change. He added that it is possible that officials would decide that no changes are needed.

The EPA's bay program, headquartered on the Annapolis waterfront, coordinates the efforts of federal and state agencies across the bay's watershed, which extends from southern Virginia to central New York.

Over the years, it has excelled at discovering the reasons for the bay's ill health, chief among which are nitrogen and phosphorus, pollutants blamed for causing algae blooms and oxygen-poor "dead zones." It has also engineered agreements between governments in 1987, promising to improve the bay by 2000; and in 2000, promising a fix in 10 years.

But where it has failed is in reaching the goals it sets. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, recently calculated that when 2010 arrives, nitrogen will have been reduced by only half of the promised amount. By its estimate, pledges to restore riverside forests and wetlands will not be met for more than 50 years.

Because of those projections, some of the program's critics are glad to hear about the plans for change.

"The bay program has failed since its creation to meet its most important pollution-reduction goals -- all of them," said Howard R. Ernst, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of the 2003 book "Chesapeake Bay Blues," which is critical of the bay cleanup effort. "I think now to reorganize is an admission of that."

But others said they doubt that changes would make much difference. Bill Matuszeski, the bay program's former director, said the real problem is a lack of funding: The jurisdictions within the bay watershed have pressed the federal government for a multi-billion-dollar Chesapeake Bay restoration fund but have gotten nowhere.

"We know what we have to do," Matuszeski said. "What we don't want to do is pay for it."