New Tack, Tied to Pollution Levels, Could Take 3 Years to Plan
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The massive government effort to save the Chesapeake Bay by 2010 has fallen well behind schedule, its chance to make environmental history at least delayed by what critics say was too much planning and too little action. Now, officials say they're working on an idea that could turn the cleanup around.
What the bay needs, they say, is a highly detailed, innovative plan. Their plan, though, probably won't be ready for three years.
Leaders at the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the cleanup, said they want to tally all pollution that the bay can safely absorb. Then they want to divvy up the total among the hundreds of sewage plants, storm-sewer systems and farm fields that send pollution downstream. Armed with the results, they could punish polluters who dump more than their share.
The plan won't be finished until about May 1, 2011.
"If we shorten the time period, you're either compromising the science or you're compromising the public engagement process," said Jon Capacasa, director of water protection for the EPA's mid-Atlantic region.
To which some environmental activists respond: Seriously?
"All it's going to do is buy three or four years more for the bureaucrats and the politicians," said Bill Matuszeski, who headed the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program from 1991 to 2001. "Ultimately, it won't help a bit."
The new plan, based on a "total maximum daily load" calculation, is to be discussed today in Annapolis during a meeting of state officials working on the cleanup. The nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation wrote a letter this week to the EPA saying that "there is no technical reason" for the new effort to take so long.
Today's meeting occurs as the bay cleanup nears a discouraging anniversary. It has been nearly 25 years since state and federal officials signed a pledge to work together for the Chesapeake.
But, scientists say, the bay still has too much mud, too much pollution, too little oxygen and too few crabs.
"We've done a good job of keeping things from getting worse," L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources, said yesterday. "But we're certainly not making tremendous, quantifiable progress."
The bay's problems come from its watershed, an area of 64,000 square miles that stretches into West Virginia and southern New York. Treated sewage, farm manure and dirt wash into creeks, then tributary rivers and on into the Chesapeake. There, the pollutants feed massive algae blooms, which consume the underwater oxygen that fish, crabs and other creatures need.
But understanding the problems has always proved easier than fixing them.
In 2000, officials signed the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, promising a return to health by 2010. But cleanup officials say that the first few years were spent on scientific studies and elaborate planning processes. It took years to craft "tributary strategies" showing what should be done along the rivers.
"Talking through the solutions took much longer than we thought," said Ann Pesiri Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. The commission is an advisory group of state legislators from across the watershed. "The result is, yeah, we didn't take enough action fast enough," she said.
Officials now concede that the 2010 deadline will be missed. So, they have turned their attention to the new daily load plan.
In one sense, the shift comes from necessity: An old court ruling mandates such a plan if the 2010 deadline is missed. But EPA leaders and environmentalists say it could also provide a new environmental hammer: Once a sewage plant's pollution limit is set, for instance, the plant's operators could be cited for violating it.
But the problem, as before, is time.
EPA officials say they have calculated similar plans for smaller bodies of water, such as the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, but never anything on this scale in the mid-Atlantic. They will have to compute pollution needs, negotiate with each state in the watershed over its share of the load and listen to public comments along the way.
It can't be rushed, they said.
Capacasa could not provide a new date by which the bay would be restored to health. "I really can't address that," he said.
"If that's what the idea is, to take another three years, then it's politics as usual for the bay, which is: Do little, delay and study," said Howard R. Ernst, a professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy who wrote a book, "Chesapeake Bay Blues," about the politics of the cleanup.
On the Eastern Shore yesterday, seafood processor Jack Brooks said he had concerns about the new plan. Brooks, whose Cambridge, Md., company picks the meat from blue crabs, said he got a good look at the bay's pollution problems last weekend, driving over the Bay Bridge after a rainstorm.
"It looked like a chocolate milkshake out there" because of mud swept from upstream, Brooks said. "It's just, just awful."
If it took three years to finish a plan for these problems, "that's an awful long time," Brooks said.
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