Obama makes Bay cleanup national priority

MOUNT VERNON

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Tuesday elevating the Chesapeake Bay cleanup to a national priority, promising a larger and more aggressive federal role in restoring the troubled estuary.

Obama's head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, called the order "a turning point" in the 25-year-old, stalled drive to revive the Bay, saying no other president has issued such a White House declaration before.

She said redoubled efforts for the Chesapeake will be a national model for cleanups of other famed but tainted waterways, mentioning the Great Lakes, Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay.

"This is only a first step, but a big one," Jackson said at a meeting of government leaders from across the mid-Atlantic at Mount Vernon, George Washington's birthplace overlooking the Potomac River.

At the same gathering, political leaders from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, New York and Washington, D.C., agreed to accelerate their programs for cutting pollutants harming the Bay, and to do so in a more transparent way, with regular reporting on spending and progress for the media and public.

Specifically, the members of the Chesapeake Executive Council set shorter-term goals, out to 2011, for reducing excessive nutrients that are choking the Bay. Over the next two years, they pledged to cut an additional 6.9 million pounds of nitrogen and 463,948 pounds of phosphorus that enter the Bay annually.

Too much nitrogen and phosphorus from mostly manmade sources, including sewage plants, car emissions, farms, fertilizers, city streets and development sites, is fouling the Bay with algae blooms, dead zones and too little oxygen for aquatic life.

For Virginia, the new milestone will mean a reduction of about 1 million extra pounds of nitrogen and another 35,000 pounds of phosphorus by 2011, on top of cuts already coming with the investment of millions of dollars to improve sewage treatment plants and aide farmers to curtail nutrient-rich runoff.

Officials admitted they do not know how they will achieve the new goal, but they suggested that additional regulations and more spending might be required.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said Virginia may have to change its development process or grant more financial support to farmers. His environmental advisers said cities and counties across the state will have to control more pollution in their storm water, which flows into the Bay through thousands of storm drains every time it rains.

"We've just got to find a better way to do things," said Jeff Corbin, a deputy secretary of natural resources.

Corbin said that for too many years, Virginia and other states set long-range goals for the Bay and never "cranked things up in the short term."

But now, he added, "we're going to set tough, two-year milestones and then talk about how we're going to get there."

Environmental groups were not so enthralled. Although they applauded Obama for putting the federal government squarely in the lead of the cleanup, they said the milestones are not ambitious enough and take credit for reductions already implemented.

Roy A. Hoagland, a vice president for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, pointed out, for example, that the cleanup partners agreed to cut nitrogen levels reaching the Bay each year to 175 million pounds by 2010. Even with their "new accelerated pace," Hoagland said, the states will fall far short of achieving their ultimate nitrogen goal any time soon.

Cleanup leaders pledged Tuesday to have all programs and policies in place, complete with financing, estimated in the billions, to reach their clean-water goals by 2025.

The Bay Foundation is suing the federal government for not doing enough under the Clean Water Act to hasten the cleanup.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com