December 04, 2001|By Heather Dewar | Heather Dewar,SUN STAFF
WASHINGTON - Saying the nation's economic slump is no reason to cut back environmental spending, Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams urged Congress yesterday to pass two bills that would funnel more money to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup.
"Hard economic times come and hard economic times go, but once our natural resources are gone, they are gone forever," Glendening said during the annual meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Executive Council, the governing body of the multistate bay restoration effort.
Williams, who replaced Glendening yesterday as the council's chairman, said Congress might complain that it's too hard to find money for conservation measures in a recession.
"What if our founding fathers had said, `Oh, yeah, taxation without representation is bad, but it's kind of hard to fight it and we're real busy anyway'?" Williams asked. "What if Rachel Carson had said, `Oh, well, the birds aren't here, so I'm going to the mall'?"
Glendening and Williams urged Congress to pass a bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Paul S. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, and John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican, that would upgrade all 288 sewage-treatment plants in the bay watershed. The bill would provide $660 million in federal money, about half of the upgrade's cost.
That measure would bring the cleanup effort about one-third of the way toward its goal of reducing nitrogen, the bay's most troublesome pollutant, to 190 million pounds a year or less, council members said.
They also urged senators to increase spending on programs that pay farmers to set aside land for conservation. The House has passed a version of the 2001 Farm Bill that would boost spending on such programs, but the version favored by Senate leaders would provide more for crop subsidies than for conservation.
Glendening and Williams said they back a different Senate proposal that would allocate $14.3 million for farm conservation in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, an eightfold increase over the Senate leaders' version. Senators could vote on the farm bill as early as this week, state officials said.
Three of the five executive council members - Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman - did not attend the council's public meeting in Washington yesterday, though Whitman attended a two-hour closed-door session.
In other business yesterday, the council approved two agreements aimed at reducing pollution from storm water and sediment.
One requires the states and the District of Columbia to cut storm-water pollution from public land. The governments agreed to experiment with techniques that rely on vegetation to act as a natural pollution filter by adding rooftop gardens to buildings, reducing the amount of paved areas or using grassy strips to catch and clean rainwater.
In the other agreement, local environmental groups formed an unusual partnership with the National Association of Home Builders, a frequent adversary, to encourage building designs that reduce the environmental impact of construction.
The council also set new goals for carrying out a long-standing commitment to restore the heavily polluted Anacostia River. The river, which divides the monuments of official Washington from some of the city's poorest and most industrial neighborhoods, supports fish and wading birds, including the capital's only bald eagles.
