Broken Promises on the Bay

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Voices of the Bay: A Fading Fleet

The decline of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay has resulted in fewer jobs for watermen and a shift in the local economy.

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Watermen and disease depleted its creatures, and farms, sewage plants and suburban storm drains polluted its water. They sent down a mix of manure, human waste and fertilizer that fed algae blooms, which depleted the water's oxygen.

In most cases, officials knew how to reduce this pollution. But almost from the beginning, they struggled to implement these measures on the appropriate scale (see "Scenes of an Effort Impeded," Page A8).

"The science has been clear. The solutions have been very straightforward," said William C. Baker, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "And yet the public policy has not followed the science."

The government effort to fix all this formally began Dec. 9, 1983, when the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the District's mayor and the EPA administrator signed a short agreement promising to work together for the bay. In 1987, the leaders set the bay's first deadline: They pledged to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus by 40 percent by 2000.

Soon after, officials banned phosphorus-rich phosphates from laundry detergent. They suspended fishing for rockfish and pushed sewage plants to reduce the pollution they dumped into rivers. In public, it seemed that the cleanup was working.

In fact, that's what the EPA said: "Pollution abatement programs are working," a "State of the Chesapeake Bay" report said in 1995.

Two years later, the EPA's Chesapeake office predicted that the bay cleanup would meet one key deadline: "The Baywide goal for phosphorus reduction will be met by the year 2000," it said, in a "reevaluation" of progress so far.

Internal documents from the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a group of state legislators that helps lead the cleanup, show a different view.

"In a nutshell, I don't entirely trust the reevaluation," Ann Pesiri Swanson, the commission's executive director, wrote in a 1997 briefing memo for the commission's chair. The EPA figures, Swanson wrote, "project a rosy picture. Monitoring indicates a longer row-to-hoe before we meet success."

In reality, Matuszeski, head of the EPA Chesapeake Bay program at the time, said the cleanup effort was struggling. Despite progress on sewage plants, state and federal agencies had done little to tackle pollution from farms, septic tanks and city storm sewers.

"There wasn't enough going on, and there wasn't enough money behind it, and there wasn't enough regulation behind it," Matuszeski said. He said, for instance, that Maryland officials had rejected his general suggestion to put tighter rules on farms.

But, Matuszeski said, the EPA program was worried about losing congressional and state funding, which would jeopardize even the modest progress that was being made: "As public officials, you are driven by the idea that the American people like to be part of a winning team."