Bay Restoration

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 Susquehanna River and its big dams have been in the news lately. A handful of Maryland county officials would like you to believe the dams are the primary ill of the Chesapeake Bay. They claim that because sediment reservoirs behind the Conowingo Dam are at capacity, instead of trapping pollutants during storms, the dam now allows two pollutants - phosphorus and sediment - to flow downstream at alarming rates. They argue that years of restoration progress have been erased and that current bay restoration efforts do not address these issues.

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.

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.

IF THERE WAS any lingering doubt about the desperate need for speedy work to curb pollutants entering the Chesapeake Bay, last year's nightmare of crabs and other sea life scrambling to escape the oxygen-free dead zone that now extends 100 miles through the estuary's main stem must surely have erased it. The conundrum for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has been how to come up with the billions of dollars required when the state budget is deeply in the red....

Pennsylvania and Virginia are considering easing their restrictions on toxic pollution, raising fears that the multistate commitment to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay is weakening.Critics point to the moves by the two states toward easing strict limits on discharge of some toxic chemicals as evidence that the resolve of the partners in bay restoration falls short of their public rhetoric."If you look behind the scenes, they're really trying to weaken what they're doing now," said Barbara Kooser, an environmental scientist in the Harrisburg, Pa., office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

A redesigned Chesapeake Bay license plate, complete with lush grasses, crabs and a heron, is giving bay restoration efforts a financial boost. The Chesapeake Bay Trust is expected to announce tonight that the new "Treasure the Chesapeake" license plate brought in more than $850,000 for bay protection projects last year. That means about 85,000 residents purchased the plates last year, when the redesigned version made its debut. The bay plates cost $20, of which the Motor Vehicle Administration keeps half.

A state task force called Tuesday for tripling the "flush fee" Maryland homeowners pay as a way to help finance an accelerated cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay. The 28-member task force, appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley to tackle sewage and growth issues, voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the $2.50 monthly bay restoration fee be doubled next year and increased to $7.50 a month by 2015. The fee is levied on water and sewer bills for utility customers, and on property tax bills for homeowners on septic systems.

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.

If you are stumped on what to buy the environmentalist in your family, look no further. Here are some holiday gift ideas with a Chesapeake Bay theme -- everything from Bay folk music to Maryland's new environmental license plate for your car.* Bay music -- "Bay Folk" is Maryland's first collection of songs celebrating the preservation of the Chesapeake Bay. Available on cassette and compact disc, "Bay Folk" is a special way to bring the Chesapeake Bay...