Editor’s note: This article is part of a series, Our Waterways, examining the health of smaller streams and sections of rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. To suggest a waterway, contact Jeremy Cox at jcox@bayjournal.com.
Despite more than four decades of cleanup efforts, the Chesapeake Bay is still plagued with ecological problems, such as massive algae blooms, oxygen-depleted waters and an oyster population that remains a fraction of its historic size.
Could it be that those efforts have been too haphazard?
There’s typically a lot of fanfare when a restoration project focuses on a given watershed within the Bay’s drainage basin, said U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat from Maryland and a leading proponent for the Bay cleanup.
“But then we move on to another watershed and do another random act of restoration over there, and when we turn back, we wonder why we haven’t made substantive water-quality improvements in the Chesapeake Bay,” she said.
Elfreth delivered those remarks on the edge of a Giant supermarket parking lot in Annapolis. She and other state and local VIPs had gathered there May 29 to celebrate the completion of two “bio-retention cells”— resembling artificial bogs — aimed at reducing nutrient and sediment pollution in the parking lot’s stormwater runoff.
This was no “random act of restoration,” Elfreth said, but rather one of the first steps in a carefully orchestrated five-year plan to boost the health of the Severn River in Anne Arundel County. Supporters hope that by concentrating funding and improvements in one watershed, they can achieve a faster, more appreciable environmental response.
And the Severn isn’t alone. There are four other Maryland watersheds receiving similar makeovers: Antietam Creek in Washington County, Baltimore Harbor, Newport Bay near Ocean City and the upper Choptank River on the Eastern Shore.
They represent the inaugural class of waterways receiving help under the state’s Whole Watershed Act. The measure was inspired by a landmark 2023 scientific report. Authored by the Bay effort’s scientific advisers, the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response pushed for shifting the focus toward improving shallow waters, theoretically delivering more direct benefits to people and aquatic life.
“I think what we learned from that was we needed to move faster,” said Josh Kurtz, head of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “We needed to make sure that we linked the solutions together.”
Elfreth, who sponsored the Whole Watershed Act legislation in 2024 as a member of the Maryland Senate at the time, described the effort as an “entirely coordinated and full watershed approach.”
“Imagine this,” she said, motioning to the newly installed project behind her, “but in every single parking lot in the city of Annapolis within the Severn River watershed.”
The law required the five selected watersheds to represent a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas with at least two being in “an overburdened or underserved community.” The Severn, whose 80-square-mile basin includes communities such as Annapolis, Severna Park and Arnold, was chosen for the suburban category.
“You have distributed impervious surfaces unlike, say, Baltimore city, where you’ve got an urban core that is extremely developed,” said Ben Fertig, restoration manager for the Severn River Association, a member of the coalition coordinating the river’s Whole Watershed program.
Impervious surfaces are hardened land coverings, such as roads and rooftops, that block rain from percolating into the ground. But even though suburban areas have less concentrated impervious cover than their urban counterparts, they contribute to the Bay’s problems in their own way, Fertig noted.
“Here, you do have lawns and gardens and fields and so on,” he said. “But that also presents a challenge in terms of nutrients because those [landscapes] require water, fertilizers and a bunch of pesticides and herbicides.”
The Severn watershed is home to the state capital and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, from which the Baywide cleanup is coordinated. And the U.S. Naval Academy stands sentinel where the river meets the Bay.
But such proximity to power hasn’t resulted in sweeping water-quality improvements. Among the lowlights:
- Once a stronghold in the Chesapeake’s oyster industry, the river has been shuttered to harvesting for a century because of contamination by bacteria.
- The river’s water quality received a C-plus on its most recent report card in 2023, a marginally higher grade than the previous year partly because of drier weather.
- A large expanse of nearly oxygen-free water occupies much of the river during the summer, killing aquatic life that isn’t able to flee. That’s true particularly in a wide, slow-moving part of the river known as Round Bay.
The $250,000 project at the Giant on Bay Ridge Road should not only reduce pollutants in the stormwater but also lower its temperature before it reaches a Severn tributary called Back Creek, said Jesse Iliff, executive director of the Severn River Association. Warmer water is more likely to form algae blooms, which rob the water of oxygen as they die.
The two bio-retention cells capture stormwater flowing off the 1-acre parking lot, filtering it through a bed of sand, soil and organic material. They’re designed to hold up to a foot of stormwater before the excess water spills into a raised overflow inlet.
This isn’t the first time that state officials have attempted a coordinated approach to watershed-level restoration.
For instance, the Targeted Watershed program, launched under Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich in 2005, devoted nearly $20 million toward restoring the Corsica River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore within five years. A 2020 assessment found improvements in nutrient management and habitat but little progress on water clarity, underwater grass acreage and the extent of algae blooms.
Those middling results have led Bay scientists to question whether restoration projects, even when massed together, can have a measurable impact on a waterway’s health, especially larger ones like the Severn where there’s more land to treat.
The goals of the Whole Watershed Act are open-ended. The law defines its purpose as “accelerat[ing] restoration of the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic coastal bays and their watersheds” in ways that are “cost-effective” and “likely to demonstrate a rapid systemic response.” That response can include removing a waterway from the federal list of impaired waters.
Each of the five watersheds have received $2 million to cover this year’s work. Future funding is uncertain, though state officials say the goal is to maintain at least that level of funding going forward.
None of those involved in the Whole Watershed effort expect it to resolve the Severn’s pollution woes within five years. If they don’t make it, well, they’ll just find ways to keep going, they say.
“The Whole Watershed Act is an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not it,” Iliff said. “It wouldn’t be enough to do it alone.”
