Revision Of Chesapeake Cleanup Agreement Roiled By Shutdown, Criticism

Efforts to revise the Chesapeake Bay’s cleanup blueprint are encountering turbulent waters just weeks before the deadline for it to be finalized.

As of late October, clouds of uncertainty hung over a key question: When will the new Chesapeake Bay Agreement be officially approved? And many observers, some with decades-long ties to the program, were critical of the pact, saying it lacks ambition.

The federal government shutdown has ground to a halt much of the work within the Chesapeake Bay Program, the state-federal collaboration that oversees the cleanup.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which coordinates the effort, was still partially operating more than two weeks into the shutdown. But if the stoppage continues, the agency is expected to run out of leftover funds soon, triggering furloughs and further slowing progress.

The Bay Program’s Executive Council is scheduled to meet in early December to sign the agreement, cementing the first top-to-bottom revision of the plan since 2014. But if EPA employees are forced to stop working, it could postpone that meeting to “a later date,” Bay Program spokesperson Rachel Felver said.

The earliest that all members of the Executive Council — the EPA administrator, governors of Bay states, mayor of the District of Columbia and chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission — could be brought together would then likely be “into 2026,” Felver added, “given potential scheduling conflicts with the holiday season.”

The shutdown puts strain on the Bay partnership, said Alison Hooper Prost, vice president of advocacy and restoration for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. At a time when their knowledge was perhaps most needed, many federal scientists and officials have been unable to participate in discussions.

“We won’t know until the shutdown ends whether decisions taken in their absence align with how all federal agencies would have voted,” she said. “The Chesapeake Bay is one of those rare issues with longstanding bipartisan support. It’s absurd that the politics of a government shutdown could undermine decades of progress.”

“The federal agencies that take the lead on fisheries, environmental education, waterbirds and monitoring are not sitting there and providing their expertise,” said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition. “It was a very scary glimpse into what the Bay Program could look like if we lose these federal agencies.”

The Bay Program received about 1,200 pages of public feedback on a draft version of the agreement during a two-month comment period over the summer. Some took the program to task for sidestepping a decision on setting an overarching deadline for meeting the targets — a sign, they said, that leaders were trying to avoid accountability.

The most common criticism was that many of the proposed goals were on track to be less ambitious than those in the 2014 agreement. In a show of discontent, about 60 watershed scientists and policymakers signed a letter assailing the draft as “deficient,” as well as “considerably weakened from the 2014 agreement” and “incapable of effectively guiding restoration beyond 2025.”

The program’s Management Board sought to settle outstanding issues during a Sept. 30-Oct. 2 retreat. With several still unresolved, members added an Oct. 9 meeting. They made several key changes, including:

• Setting a 2040 deadline for meeting the cleanup work’s objectives, despite calls by representatives from Maryland and Virginia to aim for 2035.
• Agreeing to create or restore 6,000 acres of wetlands, split between tidal and nontidal areas. That was up from the initially proposed 3,000 acres, but critics said the larger sum still weakens the agreement from its previous incarnation. In a nod to outdoors groups, the focus will be on habitats that support waterbirds.
• Increasing the goal for streamside forest buffers over the long term from 70% in the existing agreement to 75%.
• Permanently protecting 2 million acres of land above the 2025 baseline of 9.3 million acres, making it equivalent to the 2014 agreement’s total. Earlier drafts of the update had only called for 1.5 million acres.

Some land conservation groups had pushed for the program to adopt a greater acreage goal. The Southern Maryland Conservation Alliance, for example, had called for 3.5 million acres.

“Anything less than 2 million acres could be seen as a deceleration of progress,” the group said in its comment letter.

The new agreement is notable for what it leaves out, according to Fred Tutman and Gerald Winegrad, the authors of the letter that garnered the 60 signatures from Bay experts. Tutman is the Patuxent Riverkeeper, and Winegrad is a former Maryland state senator and longtime environmental advocate.

The 2014 agreement had set goals for putting in place actions to reduce sediment and nutrient pollution by 60% by 2017 and 100% by 2025. The effort fell well short of those goals. The proposed update makes no such vows, pushing instead for the Bay Program to develop new goals after updated water-quality computer modeling is available in 2030.

“Once again,” Tutman and Winegrad wrote after the Management Board’s meeting, “the fecklessly weak agreement chooses to ignore the fact that 70.6% of Bay waters remain impaired, only a 2.9% improvement since 1985.”

The new agreement should more explicitly address the potential impacts that climate change will have on the cleanup, wrote Mark Luckenbach, associate dean for research and advisory services at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in a Sept. 1 comment letter. He described the four pages of feedback he contributed as a “consensus view” of VIMS scientists.

“Four references to ‘changing environmental conditions’ within the body of the draft agreement apparently serve as politically acceptable code for this, but even these references fail [to] speak directly to how or if we can ‘enhance resilience’ of native fishes or [underwater grasses] to warming climate or more variable rainfall,” Luckenbach wrote.

Further changes to the agreement could take place before it goes before the Executive Council as the Bay Program’s members continue to meet in the coming weeks.

Reilly said she is happy to see some goals go beyond what was sought in the 2014 predecessor. But overall, she views the document as a reflection of the challenging political landscape in which it was forged.

“Right now, we’re living in a time where our federal partners don’t know if they’ll have a job the next morning or if the funding they’ve been appropriated by Congress will be unilaterally withheld by the administration,” she said. “We’re not living in inspiring times, so I don’t know that we should be fully expecting an inspiring agreement.”