Trolling for environmental votes, Mayor Martin O'Malley promised yesterday an array of policies to save the Chesapeake Bay if elected governor, while criticizing Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. as a development-friendly leader with a flawed record of protecting land and water.
O'Malley, the likely Democratic nominee for governor, said that if elected he would create a new state program called BayStat to marshal efforts to monitor and protect the bay.
The proposal is a variation on Baltimore's CitiStat agency, an O'Malley-created statistical management system that requires city agency heads to answer weekly questions about services like filling potholes and maintaining city vehicles. Results are tabulated and posted online.
"If you don't believe that anything can be done about [the bay], then by all means let's just keep doing what we haven't been doing under Bob Ehrlich for four more years," said O'Malley, standing on a sun-baked bluff above the bay in Downs Park in Pasadena.
Ehrlich administration and campaign officials said O'Malley's proposals simply repackage existing state efforts under a new layer of bureaucracy. And the state's chief protector of the bay - the Chesapeake Bay Foundation - said O'Malley misrepresented its data to blame Ehrlich for the Chesapeake's ill health.
"All the mayor offers is empty, tired rhetoric," said Henry Fawell, a spokesman for the governor's office. "All the governor offers is unprecedented environmental achievement."
O'Malley did not specify how much the monitoring program would cost or how he would pay for it, but he said it represented a new direction on environmental policy.
The mayor also proposed fully funding land-preservation efforts, accelerating upgrades of water treatment plants, increasing water monitoring money and creating an agency to oversee regional restoration efforts with other states. All of the plans - including publishing a bay budget and issuing daily public information alerts - would be managed under BayStat.
O'Malley gave faint praise for one of the Ehrlich administration's chief environmental initiatives - a $30 yearly fee on sewage and septic bills to pay for wastewater treatment plant improvements that Ehrlich backers pointed to yesterday as evidence of the governor's stewardship.
The mayor said the initiative, known as the "flush tax," was not enough. He said 72 percent of the sewage treatment facilities in the program have not even entered the design phase for improvements.
