Bay Restoration

FIRST, let's be grateful that all the smiling pols didn't show up at Wye Mills this week for photo opportunities and overblown oratory, marking the launching of the Chesapeake 2000 draft plan.That means the real work of charting and improving the health of the Chesapeake Bay over the next decade can begin in earnest. It means that troublesome differences between bay states can be worked out through professional negotiation and expert persuasion, rather than through public saber-rattling.Controlling growth is the main sticking point of the Chesapeake Bay Program that is to be adopted by Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government will help in the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay by taking better care of the 2.2 million acres it owns in the bay watershed, under a recently signed agreement.The Federal Agencies' Chesapeake Ecosystem Unified Plan commits the government to bay restoration projects on federal lands and shorelines.It also pledges that the government will not overdevelop those lands, in accordance with Maryland's Smart Growth initiative.``It is so important to have the federal government on board full-throttle,'' because the government is responsible for many of the problems in the watershed, said Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C. Democrat.

SO ESTIMABLE WAS the small group assembled for a morning of conversation last week at Washington College, it may be odd to compare them to oysters -- but they'll understand.Most of them, oysterlike, settled here and stuck for the bulk of their careers. Like bivalves filtering the bay's water, their work left the estuary better off. It also gave us a taste for the Chesapeake that will linger as long as people care to protect the marvelous resource they have inherited.The gathering was conceived as an "across the generations dialogue" by its organizers, several private and government organizations involved in bay restoration.

THIS COLUMN recently featured the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's new State of the Bay report, which ranked the estuary's health at 27 on a scale of 100.That was progress, up about five points from the early 1980s, CBF said. But it is far from what it thinks is attainable -- about 70.(A score of 100, the bay's pre-Colonial health, simply isn't realistic).The report raises a concern: It has taken about 15 years to improve the bay's health by only five points. That represents one point every three years.

On the first Earth Day in 1970, in an issue dedicated to environment that remains pertinent reading, Fortune magazine concluded: "What we still don't know is whether a high-technology society can achieve a safe, durable and improving relationship with its environment."And 27 years later, we still don't know.In 1987, in the first of five books I've written on the Chesapeake Bay, I concluded:"Will we save the bay? I know that we will always be trying; but 'saving the bay' can become almost a state of grace, like tithing, allowing us to proceed comfortably with business as usual "Ten years later, the words don't seem overly pessimistic or nearly as outdated as I hoped they would.

CHOOSE ONE:Chesapeake Bay in 2000 -- a national and international model of environmental restoration.Chesapeake Bay in 2000 -- Hey, it could have been a lot worse.A bit more than a decade into the unprecedented, multistate effort to save the bay, we are on a slippery slope, downhill from the first statement, coming in sight of the second.Plenty has been achieved but the forces that launched the Chesapeake's restoration are running out of steam, desperate for leadership.It was a small incident that crystallized this for me recently.

The cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, which President Clinton will highlight today in a visit to Havre de Grace, may be jeopardized by possible federal spending cuts and easing of environmental laws, scientists and environmental officials say.Considered a national model for restoring a degraded coastal water body, the 12-year-old cleanup campaign has halted the bay's decline and reversed the loss of underwater grasses that provide habitat for crabs and fish.But...

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.

Maryland's latest plan for restoring the Chesapeake Bay is under fire from the Environmental Protection Agency, which doubts that enough of the state's farmers will voluntarily curb pollution from their fields and feedlots.In a letter written earlier this month, the EPA's Chesapeake Bay office in Annapolis contends that farmers must be compelled to participate in what are now mostly voluntary conservation programs if the state hopes to clean up the bay's rivers and streams.That assertion was quickly rejected by Maryland officials, who say farmers will respond better to appeals for their cooperation than to government regulations.

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.

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.

State and federal governments would receive new enforcement powers and funds to clean up the Chesapeake Bay - but would also have to meet firm deadlines to act - under proposed legislation released Tuesday by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin. Cardin, chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency's bay program, said the bill would give states more authority to regulate runoff and provide more than $1.5 billion in new funds to clean up urban and suburban storm water, a growing and costly source of pollution fouling the Chesapeake.

The latest round of state budget cuts is taking a couple of bites out of Maryland's efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay, trimming plans to tackle polluted runoff from city and suburban streets and curtailing monitoring of the bay's health. State officials are cutting $2 million from the Bay Trust Fund, a special pot of money lawmakers had agreed on three years ago to earmark for curbing polluted runoff - a growing and particularly difficult problem for the bay. Originally meant to accelerate the pace of bay cleanup, the fund has been shrinking since its inception.

A three-year, $100 million effort to cut levels of nutrients coming from Howard County's wastewater treatment plant in Savage got under way Thursday with a ceremonial groundbreaking. More than five years in the planning, the project will use waste from a nearby ice cream plant to help produce enough bacteria to sharply reduce the nitrogen being emitted with wastewater from 3,900 pounds a day now, to 830 pounds per day in 2012, when the work is completed. Reuse of some treated water will also help by diverting it from the Patuxent River.

A three-year, $100 million effort to cut levels of nutrients coming from Howard County's wastewater treatment plant in Savage got under way Thursday with a ceremonial groundbreaking. More than five years in the planning, the project will use waste from a nearby ice cream plant to help produce enough bacteria to sharply reduce the nitrogen being emitted with wastewater from 3,900 pounds a day now, to 830 pounds per day in 2012, when the work is completed. Reuse of some treated water will also help by diverting it from the Patuxent River.

A group of Chesapeake Bay scientists and advocates is calling for new, more aggressive efforts to restore the bay, saying that the current approach has not worked and that the troubled estuary is getting worse. The group - more than a dozen scientists, policy specialists and activists - presented its recommendations to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's bay program office in Annapolis on the eve of today's 25th anniversary of the formal launch of the bay restoration effort.

Pointing to more than two decades of failure to restore the Chesapeake Bay, the region's largest environmental group is threatening to sue the federal government for shirking its legal responsibility to reduce water pollution in the troubled estuary. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation says it will formally notify the Environmental Protection Agency today that it intends to sue the agency for not living up to the latest in a series of bay restoration agreements. The pact calls for cleaning up the bay by 2010, a deadline the EPA acknowledges is unlikely to be met. Foundation President William C. Baker said yesterday that the EPA has been an "absent partner" in the bay restoration effort, and the suit will seek a legally binding federal plan to clean up the bay and to spend the money to do it. "People are fed up with the government's failure to reduce pollution in this national treasure," Baker said.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration wants to spend more than $56 billion to conserve farmland over the next decade, prompting an unprecedented push by Chesapeake Bay advocates to carve out a slice of the money for the imperiled estuary. Lawmakers and environmentalists say that negotiations on this year's wide-ranging farm bill - better known for the subsidies historically provided to corn and sugar growers, among others - offer the best chance yet to protect the threatened waterway from contaminants flushed in from fertilizer and manure.

Grass-roots environmental groups from five states and the District of Columbia are urging newly elected political leaders to take seriously the task of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay or risk losing it forever as a thriving ecosystem. River-protection advocates representing Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., have signed a Declaration for Our Watersheds, which calls on state and federal officials to honor cleanup commitments outlined in the Chesapeake 2000 agreement.

Column on rape sends wrong signals Susan Reimer's column regarding the lessons from the Lamar Owens rape case seemed to send a familiar message: "When in doubt, blame the girl" ("The lessons to take from Owens verdict," July 25). I can remember when the comments about rape victims included, "she dressed too suggestively," "her blouse was too low-cut," "her skirt was too short," "her morals are questionable," "she's not a virgin," "she shouldn't have been walking there at night," "she has a bad reputation" and "she got him too excited."