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Coalition Warns of Lawsuit On Bay
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"We think that we can get more done in the watershed and in the communities than in courtrooms," said Grumbles, who is the assistant EPA administrator for water.
The bay, which Baltimore writer H.L. Mencken called an "immense protein factory" for its abundance of fish and shellfish, is a vast estuary troubled by microscopic contaminants. The pollutants nitrogen and phosphorus wash downstream from sewage plants, septic tanks and manure-laden farm fields, from western New York to Southside Virginia.
The pollutants are plant food, and in the Chesapeake they fuel unnaturally large blooms of algae, which suck up the oxygen that fish, crabs and other creatures need to live. The low-oxygen "dead zones" were the Chesapeake's main problem in 1983, when leaders from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and the EPA signed the first agreement promising to help the bay come back.
They remain a crippling problem today, despite subsequent agreements to clean up the bay by 2000 and then by 2010. Environmental groups have said that state and federal regulators have mired themselves in endless planning processes and avoided hard decisions that would have forced new rules or new costs on farmers and septic-system owners.
Next month, leaders from states around the bay watershed could set a new deadline at their annual meeting. Notes from a previous meeting indicate that Maryland and Virginia were in favor of a 2020 deadline, but New York and Pennsylvania officials wanted to wait before picking a date.
The groups behind today's letter say action must come sooner. William C. Baker, the bay foundation's president, said a judge could require the EPA to take more drastic steps, such as setting a moratorium on all new permits to pollute in the watershed or cutting funding to states or cities that lag behind their cleanup plans.
"Not one, not two, but three times, a signed agreement has failed to produce any significant action," Baker said. "So we don't see another option than to petition the federal court."
