Finding fortitude to fix the Bay

Efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay have amounted to decades of good intentions and optimism undone by bureaucratic and political cowardice. The result is an estuary that is only somewhat better than it could have been, which is dead.

Agreements among the states surrounding the Bay stretch back decades. Despite reams of well-meaning documents, the Chesapeake remains a shadow of the vigorous body of water it was a century ago, as the annual dead zones in the main stem will attest.

That's because population growth in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the other watershed states has funneled tons of nutrients and contaminants into the Bay. Stormwater running off roads and roofs and fields carries phosphorous, nitrogen and sediments into streams, rivers and the Bay itself.

The nutrients lead to algae blooms, which rob water of oxygen each summer across a growing section of the Bay. Were it not for considerable money spent to clean up sewage-treatment plants all over the watershed, the Chesapeake would be in even worse shape.

It wasn't supposed to be this way:

"The Bay Program is in a race to meet a new goal: Clean the Chesapeake by the end of the next decade. Unlike past goals, the new one has a potentially harsh backup. If the Bay Program doesn't succeed, the EPA could force far more prescriptive - and potentially costly - nutrient reductions, especially from regulated sources such as wastewater treatment plants, city stormwater systems and animal feedlots."

That's from The Bay Journal, back in 1999. By 2010, went the thinking at the time, if the states didn't take concrete and serious steps to clean up the Bay, the feds would force them to do so. The flaw was that the EPA - under pressure from the states and from an incoming conservative administration - had no intention of doing that.

Ten years later, another federal administration is working on another Bay cleanup plan: "The draft... includes expanded regulation of large-scale animal farms and urban-suburban stormwater runoff, but leaves room for states to cut pollution before expansion of federal regulation."

If that sounds depressingly familiar, it should.

The deal a decade back was that if states failed in their cleanup efforts, the EPA would set hard limits for how much pollution each state was allowed to put into the Bay. Now the EPA is offering the states another year to come up with a plan to do what they should have been doing for decades.

This endless dance while the Bay dies comes down to this: Neither the states nor the EPA wants to make farmers and suburb dwellers change habits that lead to so many problems in the Bay. The EPA has few direct tools to do so, and the states simply are scared of making people angry.

As an alternative, U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, from Maryland, and others have introduced legislation that would make parts of the Bay cleanup subject to the Clean Water Act and would codify the new plan.

Under the Cardin bill, states would be required to meet specific pollution targets, and the EPA would be ordered to bring down the hammer if they don't. It would provide money for stormwater mitigation and provide a way to trade pollution credits.

Cardin's bill is just beginning the process, and passage will be difficult. But given the failure of both the states and the federal government to do what must be done to clean the Chesapeake, it might be the Bay's only hope.