Bay Program

The Savage branch library, 9525 Durness Lane, will sponsor a meeting of its Savage Mystery Book Club at 7 p.m. July 13. The club will discuss City of Light by Lauren Belfer. Copies of the book are available at the branch. "The State of the Bay," a program at 7 p.m. July 12 with Patty Yergey of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, will present a recent report card about the continuing efforts to clean and restore the Chesapeake. Registration is encouraged. Information: 410-880-5980. `You Can't Take It With You' slated today and tomorrow The South Laurel Recreation Council Inc. will sponsor two performances for families of You Can't Take It With You by the Tent Troupe at 8 p.m. today and tomorrow on the grounds of Montpelier Mansion, on Route 197 at Montpelier Drive, in Laurel.

For 30 years, the Chesapeake Bay Program - a partnership including the six bay states, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies - has been measuring and assessing the bay's health and working to restore the ecosystem. In many of those years, the health findings were troubling. This year, as we release our annual Bay Barometer summarizing the bay's condition and our restoration progress, there remain many results related to water quality that reinforce our need for continued action.

Maryland's U.S. senators have joined Virginia Sen. John W. Warner in calling for an investigation of the government-funded Chesapeake Bay Program to see whether it has been "significantly overstating" how much it has been cleaning up the bay. In a letter sent Friday to the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which audits federal programs, Warner, a Republican, and Democratic Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes wrote that they were concerned that the program might be inflating results by using computer estimates rather than water quality reports.

The Chesapeake Bay is showing increased resilience in the face of natural and man-made abuses, though it's still seriously impaired, according to the latest official report on the regional restoration effort. The annual " Bay Barometer " released Thursday says that only 34 percent of the mainstem of the Chesapeake has enough oxygen in it during summer for fish and shellfish to thrive, oyster populations remain a fraction of what they once were and a majority of streams throughout the six-state watershed are in poor or very poor condition.

YOU'RE a chronic overeater. The doctor says cut back the calories or exercise hard, preferably both. What do you do? If you're the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA), you shop for clothes, hoping to give an illusion of slenderness. We're not talking about fat bureaucrats -- rather about a polluted Chesapeake, over-enriched with nutrients from farm runoff -- and an agency ducking its responsibility for reducing them. Ironically, this became clear at Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s Aug. 5 summit on agricultural nutrient pollution.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol M. Browner is poised to take on a symbolic job today: leadership of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort.The EPA chief is expected to be elected to a one-year term as chairwoman of the bay program's executive council when it meets today in Reston, Va., to review progress in the 12-year-old cleanup campaign.Ms. Browner would succeed Virginia Gov. George F. Allen, whose year at the helm of the multistate effort has been marked by clashes with the EPA over auto emission controls and pollution enforcement and complaints from opponents that the state has relaxed environmental protections to benefit industry.

The government program to clean up the Chesapeake Bay lacks credibility because it uses misleading numbers that underestimate pollution and exaggerate successes, a federal agency reported yesterday. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the Chesapeake Bay Program, which is run by the federal and state governments, should have independent scientists reviewing its reports to make sure they don't sugar-coat truths about the bay's health. Environmentalists complain that such exaggerations allow federal officials and the leaders of states surrounding the bay to make impressive-sounding claims that help them politically while undermining public support for increased funding and stronger pollution controls.

WASHINGTON - Underwater grasses in the Chesapeake Bay have reached the highest level since researchers began tracking them in 1978, federal officials announced yesterday. Officials with the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program said that a survey last year found 85,252 acres of underwater grasses baywide, 27 percent more than was found the previous year. The figures were announced at yesterday's annual meeting in Washington of the bay program's executive council, which includes the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the EPA administrator and the mayor of Washington.

U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin pledged Monday to introduce legislation to reauthorize the Chesapeake Bay Program and expand the regulatory framework that has failed to clean up the watershed. Cardin spoke at a congressional field hearing in Annapolis, which he said would be the first in a series to discuss new legislation for the bay program. The program was last authorized in 2000, expired in 2005 and has fallen far short of goals for improving the bay's water quality by 2010. While he expects a renewed focus by the Environmental Protection Agency on bay pollution, Cardin said, the bill must specifically lay out the agency's role to ensure it is carried out in a new administration.

Reading the recent reports on the Chesapeake Bay Program at 25, I smell a whiff of "Who lost the Chesapeake Bay?" We should recognize that managing the impact of 16 million Americans on the bay was always going to be difficult. What exactly the problem is, what to do to fix it, and how to make that happen - these are complicated issues that the Chesapeake Bay Program, the state and federal partnership established to clean up the bay, needed to sort out. It should not surprise anyone if we have not yet gotten it right.

The Chesapeake Bay'slong-suffering "smart" buoys , which have come back after being shot up and hit by boats and ships, now face perhaps their most serious threat yet - the budget knife. President Obama's spending plan for fiscal 2013 proposes cutting the $300,000 to keep the fleet of 10 buoys afloat in the bay, where they monitor water quality, weather conditions and serve as guides for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail . The elimination of funding for the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System is just the most visible of the deep cuts planned in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chesapeake Bay efforts.  Overall, the Annapolis NOAA office is proposed to receive $3.4 million in the coming year, down from this year's funding allocation of $5.1 million and less than half the $7.1 million the office received the year before.

The latest study on the health of the Chesapeake Bay has some encouraging news - offering signs that years of pollution-fighting efforts are having a positive effect. Now, it remains to be seen whether Congress is paying attention and can refrain from pulling the proverbial rug out from under the bay's cleanup campaign. First the good news. A new study released by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has found that efforts by Maryland and other states to reduce the flow of fertilizer, animal waste and other pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay has had a positive effect on the oxygen-deprived "dead zones" of the bay. The largest such dead zone - near the Chesapeake's deep water channel - appears to have peaked in the 1980s and declined ever since, according to the study published this month.

Release of proposals for bay cleanup is delayed a day The promised public release Wednesday of new federal proposals for jump-starting the lagging Chesapeake Bay restoration was delayed by a day and is now planned Thursday, officials said. The state and federal bay "partnership" had announced that it would release a series of draft reports outlining proposals for accelerating the pace of cleaning up the Chesapeake and safeguarding its fish and wildlife Wednesday. But late in the morning, Jim Edwards, deputy director of EPA's bay program office, said the documents were still being finalized, particularly one report that focuses on restoring and maintaining the bay's "living resources," including bay grasses, oysters, crabs, fish and other wildlife.

WASHINGTON - -The federal Environmental Protection Agency would be given enhanced authority to clean up pollution in the Chesapeake Bay under legislation now being shaped in Congress, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland said Monday. A new, regionwide pollutant-trading system is another likely feature of the measure, designed to update the struggling, 26-year-old Chesapeake Bay program. The regional partnership, which includes the federal government, District of Columbia, Maryland and five other states in the bay watershed, has repeatedly failed to meet voluntary cleanup goals.

Four state programs aiming to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution flowing to the Back and Patapsco rivers and the Chesapeake Bay will share almost $1.9 million in grant money awarded Friday from a federally funded trust. The Herring Run Watershed Association will get $450,000 to slow runoff from Baltimore city and county landowners into Herring Run and the Jones Falls. The project will divert rooftop downspouts to lawns and landscaped areas rather than let them contribute to polluted runoff on streets and sidewalks that runs into storm drains - which is expected to prevent 650 pounds of nitrogen, 98 pounds of phosphorus and 11 tons of sediment from reaching local streams.

U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin pledged Monday to introduce legislation to reauthorize the Chesapeake Bay Program and expand the regulatory framework that has failed to clean up the watershed. Cardin spoke at a congressional field hearing in Annapolis, which he said would be the first in a series to discuss new legislation for the bay program. The program was last authorized in 2000, expired in 2005 and has fallen far short of goals for improving the bay's water quality by 2010. While he expects a renewed focus by the Environmental Protection Agency on bay pollution, Cardin said, the bill must specifically lay out the agency's role to ensure it is carried out in a new administration.

Bank relocates its headquarters to Crofton business park Suburban Federal Savings Bank has moved its corporate headquarters from Landover Hills in Prince George's County to 2120 Baldwin Ave. in Priest Bridge Business Park in Crofton. Its offices opened Feb. 11. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at 2 p.m. The bank headquarters is the 24th building built in Priest Bridge Business Park, a 100-acre site with manufacturing, wholesale, retail, commercial and professional businesses. 250 new companies join Businesses for the Bay Two hundred fifty new companies and local municipalities have enrolled in Businesses for the Bay, more than doubling program membership.

Have efforts to help the Chesapeake Bay worked?"Yes and no," Michael Permenter, coordinator of the Soil Conservation Service's Chesapeake Bay Program, said Thursday.Much has been done to stop pollution, but more research and work still is needed, he said.Permenter, who worked at the Carroll County SCS office in 1987 and 1988, spoke at the Agribusiness breakfast at Baugher's Country Restaurant.A cooperative effort between three states and the District of Columbia was begun in 1983 to protect the bay, he said.

Reading the recent reports on the Chesapeake Bay Program at 25, I smell a whiff of "Who lost the Chesapeake Bay?" We should recognize that managing the impact of 16 million Americans on the bay was always going to be difficult. What exactly the problem is, what to do to fix it, and how to make that happen - these are complicated issues that the Chesapeake Bay Program, the state and federal partnership established to clean up the bay, needed to sort out. It should not surprise anyone if we have not yet gotten it right.

The Maryland Department of the Environment says Chesapeake Bay striped bass more than 28 inches long are contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs - industrial chemicals that can damage children's nervous systems. Maryland fish advisories say children should not eat large rockfish that run in springtime, and no one should eat local rockfish more than twice a month. In fact, Maryland and Virginia have posted health warnings for 23 kinds of bay fish and shellfish. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study found half the bay bottom is degraded by PCBs, mercury or pesticides.