Broken Promises on the Bay

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The EPA's Chesapeake office was focused on a massive scientific exercise: mapping 78 sub-sections of the bay and estimating how clean the water should be in each. That took three years. After states mapped out "tributary strategies" to comply with the new goals, the price tag for the cleanup grew to $28 billion.

That price tag was so high, environmentalists and officials said, it was like having no plan at all.

"We don't really have yet a truly viable plan to save the bay," said J. Charles Fox, who was Maryland secretary of natural resources from 2001 to 2003.

Hanmer, who succeeded Matuszeski as head of the EPA Chesapeake office, said she knew early in her tenure that the cleanup effort was probably moving too slowly to meet its 2010 goal.

"Is the program and the public going to be well-served by our stopping and trying to renegotiate the bay agreement?" the cleanup's leaders asked themselves, she said. She said they decided there was no way to meet the deadline without exceeding the law or turning to stricter regulations that would force farmers to go under. "We made the decision, no."

Leaders also decided not to say publicly that the effort was so far off track. Hanmer said she was told not to do so in 2002 by the Chesapeake Executive Council, which includes regional governors, the EPA administrator and the head of the bay commission. "They maintained that we should say it was doable," she said.

"For us to declare defeat would mean that we would have no chance . . . of convincing the legislators to give us financing," Hanmer said. "Rather than declare defeat, we should work harder."

Glendening, who attended the meeting as Maryland governor, said he did not recall this. Swanson, of the bay commission, remembered the council's choice differently: not as an order to keep something secret, but rather as a decision not to focus publicly on the cleanup's long-shot prospects.

"They chose not to dub it a failure," she said. "They wanted to keep trying. And the more they could maintain a hope, the more they could motivate policymakers to do the right thing."

Three years later, Hanmer was asked by a Washington Post reporter if the 2010 goals would be met. "I'm certainly not going to tell you that we can't meet it," she said.

At the bay commission, Swanson said she remembered a similar decision being made in a committee of high-ranking staff members about 2002.

"I don't think in 2002, there was a cost" to not revealing the depth of the cleanup's problems, she said. "I think that, by 2005, 2006, you know, we should have made more . . . perhaps [we] could have recognized it more publicly."