By Timothy B. Wheeler , tim.wheeler@baltsun.com|May 12, 2009
With scientists pointing to some bright spots and even a possible "tipping point" in the long-running struggle to restore the Chesapeake Bay, Gov. Martin O'Malley vowed Monday to more than double the pace of cleanup of Maryland's rivers feeding into the troubled estuary.
On the eve of a meeting in Virginia of the bay region's leaders, O'Malley joined bay scientists aboard the state-owned research vessel Rachel Carson for a firsthand look at the Bush River off Aberdeen Proving Ground, one of a handful of places throughout the Chesapeake watershed where there are signs of recovery from decades of pollution and abuse.
Seeking to jump-start a restoration effort that has missed two cleanup deadlines in the past 26 years, O'Malley, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and officials from the District of Columbia and four other states plan to gather Tuesday at Mount Vernon on the Potomac River. There they are expected to announce what they have promised will be an accelerated and more accountable effort to restore the bay.
"When Maryland goes to the table, we're going to lay out a very aggressive program of increasing our nutrient [pollution] reductions by 2.5 times what we've been doing," O'Malley said. With the help of a boost in federal funds, he said, the state would step up its efforts over the next two years to keep pollution from washing off land - getting farmers to plant "cover crops" and trees to keep fertilizer and soil from washing off their fields.
The leaders are considering setting a new "end date" 16 years from now for reducing nutrient pollution enough to shrink the oxygen-starved dead zone that spreads across the bottom of the Chesapeake every summer, making much of it unfit for the crabs, fish and oysters that once thrived there. O'Malley called the 2025 deadline "realistic," while suggesting that he would press to achieve Maryland's cleanup goals sooner than that.
But more important, O'Malley said, he and other leaders will propose steps aimed at achieving interim pollution-reduction targets, or "milestones," over the next two years. Those short-term objectives will help keep public pressure on politicians, he said, who too often put off tough choices when the consequences extend beyond the next election.
"Setting goals is great," the governor said. "But goals without benchmarks are not very helpful when you have an operation like our government that's run by people like ourselves. You need milestones."
