WASHINGTON - State and federal officials pledged yesterday to redouble their efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay but declined to set a new target date for when they plan to do it.
Instead, the officials - including the governors of Maryland and Virginia - agreed to meet again in the spring to adopt an ultimate deadline.
And they promised to lay out detailed, two-year cleanup plans intended to put more pressure on elected leaders such as themselves to make progress in the 25-year restoration effort that has left the bay's water quality as poor now as it was when the campaign began.
"We need to change the way we've come at this," said Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who took over leadership of the restoration effort yesterday from Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. The two governors, both Democrats, said they shared in the frustration felt by many bay advocates over the lack of improvement in bay water quality, despite billions of dollars spent and a multitude of laws and initiatives.
In addition to setting two-year milestones, the officials agreed to hold themselves more accountable by commissioning an independent group of scientists to monitor their actions.
The annual bay restoration meeting, which drew the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, the mayor of Washington and top officials from Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia and New York, was marked by a demonstration organized by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to protest the slow pace of bay cleanup. The Annapolis-based environmental group has threatened to sue the federal government for allegedly shirking its legal responsibility to clean up the bay.
Bay Foundation President William C. Baker said the meeting produced "nothing new."
"Set one goal and meet it, and we will cheer," he said.
Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the federal government agreed in 2000 to reduce nutrient pollution fouling the bay's waters by about 40 percent by 2010. But at last year's annual cleanup update, officials acknowledged the goal would not be met by the deadline.
The bay's health is in many respects as bad or worse than it was when the cleanup effort began in December 1983. Its water quality has actually declined in the years since, according to a rating by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The same is true of water quality in key Maryland tributaries. Farm runoff remains the leading source of nutrient pollution fouling the bay, but other, largely unchecked sources include runoff from developed land and fallout from power plants and motor vehicle exhaust.
