By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 5, 2007; A01
The multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, which government officials had pledged would succeed by 2010, will likely miss that deadline by a wide margin -- and, at the current pace, might drag on for decades more, an Environmental Protection Agency official acknowledged yesterday.
Rich Batiuk, an associate director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, made that projection at a meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group that includes state officials from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
His talk was a blunt, and public, admission of something that the EPA had conceded in an agency report last year. A pledge to "save the bay," made six years ago in the so-called Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, is falling drastically short. "If we go at the current rate that we're doing, we're talking about restoring the Chesapeake decades from now, a generation or two," Batiuk said.
The news means a continued struggle for one of this area's most cherished bodies of water, one that Washingtonians turn to for seafood, sailing, recreational fishing and weekend scenery. It is also bad news for such Chesapeake tributaries as the Potomac River, where the pollution and runoff bring mud, algae blooms and dangerous chemicals on the way to the bay.
Batiuk's assessment was not news to many environmentalists, who have said for years that roads and suburbs in the watershed were growing too fast and that cleanup efforts at farms and sewage plants were moving too slowly for the deadline to be met.
Some of them said yesterday that they were heartened that the EPA was admitting the shortfall but wished the acknowledgment had come sooner.
"Duh," said Roy Hoagland, a vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, after hearing Batiuk's talk in Annapolis. "We've been arguing for at least four years that in order to reach those goals, they need to accelerate implementation [of cleanup efforts]. . . . That is not new information."
Bay cleanup has a history of broken deadlines. In 1987, local and federal officials pledged to clean up the estuary by 2000. The current agreement, written after the first one failed, was signed by the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the mayor of Washington and the administrator of the EPA.
The officials pledged to make enormous improvements in everything from low-oxygen "dead zones" to underwater grasses to oyster populations.
In the 6 1/2 years since, Batiuk said, there have been notable successes: The northern bay has seen a huge regrowth of the grasses, which provide oxygen and shelter for aquatic life. Changes at sewage plants around the watershed have reduced their output of nitrogen and phosphorus, two pollutants linked to dead zones downstream.
But the overall picture, Batiuk said, shows a cleanup effort that is far off the pace set out in 2000. Crab populations are still below historic levels. The amount of oxygen, which fish and crabs need to live, is just 29 percent of the goal set for 2010, he said. The bay's native oysters are at just 7 percent.
Even underwater grasses, which are doing slightly better than other indicators, stand at just 42 percent of the level they're supposed to reach by 2010.
"If you draw that line out there," Batiuk said, pointing to the slow upward trend in their population, "you're at about 2040 for the grasses to come back."
One major reason for the shortfall, Batiuk said, was rapid population growth in the bay's watershed, which stretches 64,000 square miles from southern Virginia to Cooperstown, N.Y. An additional 800,000 people moved in between 2000 and 2005, bringing more neighborhoods, more cars, more lawns -- all sources of bay pollutants -- and canceling out improvements, he said.
But environmentalists have also blamed local governments, and the bay program itself, for not being more aggressive.
They have said the past six years have been consumed by research efforts and voluntary pollution-reduction programs, when new laws or stringent enforcement might have accomplished more.
One advocate of a more confrontational approach was sworn in as Maryland's attorney general Tuesday: Douglas F. Gansler (D), who has pledged an "all-out assault" on bay polluters. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has also pushed the Maryland legislature to do more in the new session, calling for a "green fund" of up to $50 million a year for pollution-reduction projects.
Batiuk's talk yesterday reflects a serious shift in rhetoric for the EPA's bay program. For years, program officials had maintained that the 2010 goal was still within reach.
But last year, bay program Associate Director Mike Burke said, officials were asked to submit goals for an EPA-wide strategic plan. Employees would be evaluated on their progress toward the goals, Burke said.
If the 2010 deadline is not met, officials said, state governments could be made to compile a "pollution budget" for the bay, listing what is coming downstream now, where it comes from and by how much it needs to be reduced.
In the meantime, a new Chesapeake agreement, with another deadline, could also be worked out.
But the past two decades have soured some people on agreements. Bernie Fowler, a former Maryland state senator who has been an outspoken voice for the Patuxent River and the bay, said he was tired of people making promises that the bay would be fixed soon.
"A lot of those very people have left the planet and haven't seen it done," said Fowler, who is 82. "I don't want that to happen to me."
