Bay Cleanup

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.

HERE'S THE problem: Chesapeake Bay crabs are overfished. They need a break to relax, recover, make love, make babies, grow big and start the cycle over and over again. But Chesapeake Bay watermen say they are underfishing. They need to catch more crabs, and catch them younger and smaller, in order to make a living and keep up their own cycle of love and babies and life. Putting aside the bias of our own yearning for a bushel of those steamed delicacies after a snowbound winter, this is a dilemma that cries out for a third way. Yielding to the watermen, as Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. proposes to do, might provide some relief in the short term but could ultimately ensure the demise of their livelihood and way of life.

$50 million in federal funds may go to bay cleanup Congress is poised to approve a record $50 million in federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort, with a portion earmarked to tighten controls on polluted runoff from urban and suburban lands and from farms. House and Senate appropriations conferees agreed Wednesday to increase bay restoration funding next year by $19 million over last year's amount - and $15 million more than President Barack Obama requested. The conferees, including Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md.

PERHAPS THE greatest frustration of Chesapeake Bay cleanup advocates is that they can't get government leaders to commit to moving quickly on the easiest part of the task. Upgrading sewage treatment plants in the bay watershed to the highest level of technology available would remove enough polluting nutrients to get one-third of the cleanup job done. But upgrades cost money, perhaps as much as $4 billion, and so far repeated pleas to the federal government to pony up the cash have been ignored.

PEOPLE WHO spend a lot of time in and around the Chesapeake Bay gauge the success of restoration efforts by the white bathing suit test: Does the suit stay white after it's been in the water? That may not be a scientific measure of the level of pollutants, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, but it clearly indicates whether conditions are getting better or worse. Which may be more than the complicated computer modeling of the federal-state partnership, charged with managing the bay cleanup, is able to do. Using calculations and projections, the Chesapeake Bay Program boasts that phosphorus pollution has dropped by 28 percent since 1985, while nitrogen pollution declined by 18 percent.

Chesapeake Bay continues to decline, despite the comeback of rockfish and reduced pollution from factories and municipal sewage plants, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation said today.In a sweeping 288-page report on the state of the bay, the Annapolis environmental group concludes that "a decade of intense private and public effort to save the bay has averted immediate disaster."But the Chesapeake is still losing ground to suburban sprawl that gnaws away at the bay's remaining forests and wetlands, robbing it of its ability to recover from the pollution that has degraded its waters.

Could pollution "trading" really shave billions of dollars from the costs of restoring the Chesapeake Bay?  Or would the long-running cleanup effort suffer at the hands of those looking to make a buck on it? A study presented Thursday to the Chesapeake Bay Commission suggests there could indeed be significant cost savings from letting polluters pay others to make less expensive reductions in bay-fouling nutrient pollution elsewhere.  RTI International, an economic consulting firm from Research Triangle Park NC, found that savings could range from 20 to 80 percent, depending on how trading is structured.

Scientists say a six-year warming trend in the Chesapeake Bay's water could be due to local weather patterns rather than global warming and should not determine the bay cleanup plans."

Needing a transfusion of money to continue the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, the state has created a panel to help find additional funding, possibly from the private sector.Gov. William Donald Schaefer was to announce formation of the 22-member group headed by Harford County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann today. It includes local and state officials, bankers, business people, academics and a farmer.Coming amid unofficial projections that Maryland's bay effort will need an extra $60 million to $100 million a year, the panel's appointment appears aimed at overcoming -- or bypassing -- political resistance to requests for increased government spending.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation president announced Tuesday a "historic" settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency, calling on federal regulators to improve bay waters largely by pressing state and local governments to crack down on polluters. With top EPA officials present at the foundation's Annapolis offices, President William C. Baker said the agreement settles a lawsuit brought in the waning days of the Bush administration accusing the federal government of neglecting its legal responsibility to restore the bay. "This agreement is a game changer," Baker said.