Bay Cleanup

A former Maryland natural resources secretary has been tapped to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, an appointment activists say they hope signifies an increased commitment by the Obama administration to cleaning up the troubled estuary. J. Charles Fox, who has held a variety of posts in state and federal government and with environmental groups, will be a special assistant to the EPA administrator for the bay and for the Anacostia River in Washington, according to sources familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to avoid upstaging the official announcement.

Chesapeake Bay-area lawmakers today announced that they are seeking federal legislation that will increase federal spending for the Chesapeake Bay restoration campaign by more than 50 percent to $20 million a year over the next four years.The measure would provide an additional $7 million a year for research and monitoring, for cleaning up toxic pollution and for dealing with the environmental impact of development and population growth in the bay region.At a news conference on the Capitol steps in Washington, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, D-Md.

Suburban sprawl in the Chesapeake Bay watershed threatens to negate progress made in bay cleanup efforts, according to a report issued yesterday by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The report, a comprehensive survey of development practices and statistics within the bay's watershed, predicts that an area 50 times larger than Washington, D.C., would be converted to homes, shopping centers and parking lots in the next 25 years if development trends continue as they have during the past 25 years.

WASHINGTON - Armed with a study that pegs the price of Chesapeake Bay cleanup at $18.7 billion by the end of the decade, members of a tri-state commission came to Capitol Hill yesterday to seek added federal funds. They took a request for $2.5 billion in new federal money - on top of $1 billion in U.S. funds they say is already earmarked for the bay by 2010 - to lawmakers from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. "We have basically come to Congress to say we probably need to triple that involvement, along with tripling the states' involvement" in bay restoration, Ann P. Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, told Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest, an Eastern Shore Republican.

As a major holder of Chesapeake shoreline, the Pentagon renewed its support for the bay cleanup yesterday, and other federal agencies pledged to help in the restoration.The "ecosystem management" agreement signed in Washington points up the fact that the federal government not only helps regulate the bay environment but also is a significant user and potential polluter of the Chesapeake.The accord seeks to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals and nutrients from federal lands -- as the government has pressed industry and others to do on private lands.

At a recent supper party in the foothills West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, a fisherman had just returned from Kent Narrows with a bushel of Maryland Blue Crabs. The crabs, rest their souls, made wonderful emissaries. The light conversation that punctuated the picking would have fit right in around tables in Salisbury or Solomons Island: The size of the crabs, their habits, their tastes in bait and, more generally, the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay. A hundred or more miles from its sparkling, reedy inlets, the bay is still very much in the psyche of people throughout its watershed.

Facing federal and state mandates to reduce pollution washing off its streets and alleys, Baltimore city is taking the first step toward imposing a fee on residents or property owners to pay for controlling its tainted storm-water runoff. City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Youngintroduced a resolution Monday night calling for a charter amendment to create a "stormwater utility" for Baltimore. It's slated for a hearing June 12 before the council's judiciary and legislative investigations committee, chaired byCouncilmanJames B. Kraft.

Four years ago when Glenn Page looked over the 7-acre marsh on the east side of Fort McHenry, all he saw was trash containing everything from logs to hypodermic needles. Yesterday, the National Aquarium employee joined the National Park Service and federal politicians in dedicating the marsh as a wetland exhibit. Page and others hope to use the wetland waters and grasses to teach adults and youngsters the fragile nature of the Chesapeake Bay. "It's a field station," said Page, the aquarium's director of conservation.

The effort to restore Chesapeake Bay still has a long way to go, but Maryland officials say they already see signs of recovery in the rivers that feed the ailing estuary.New data from long-term monitoring indicate that the Patuxent River, one of the Chesapeake's major tributaries, is getting cleaner, according to scientists with the Maryland Department of the Environment.In the past five years, there has been a dramatic drop in the river's levels of phosphorus, one of two nutrients blamed for choking off bay grasses and fish.