Bay Restoration

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency came to Annapolis yesterday to announce a new $10 million in federal grants for sewage treatment projects in Chesapeake Bay country. But EPA Administrator Michael O. Leavitt refused to say what the total amount for bay restoration will be in the Bush administration's 2005 budget, to be unveiled next week. And despite not-so-subtle pressure from Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. - standing beside him at a news conference - Leavitt did not say whether the federal government will make the Chesapeake Bay a national priority on a par with saving the Everglades, nor whether the president will pledge up to $1 billion a year to reduce bay pollution.

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....

FAIRFAX, Va. - Marking the 20th anniversary of the landmark agreement to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, the governors of Maryland and Virginia kicked off yesterday a campaign to make bay restoration a top national priority in hopes of securing billions in federal aid. "We are going to launch an effort to raise the Chesapeake Bay issue to one of national importance," Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner said at a meeting on the George Mason University campus....

Sen. Paul. S. Sarbanes proposed yesterday creation of a federal panel to find new sources of money to reduce nutrient pollution into the Chesapeake Bay. Sarbanes' legislation would create a 21-member Blue Ribbon Commission on Chesapeake Bay Nutrient Pollution Control Financing to focus on curbing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from sewage treatment plants, fertilized farmland and storm water in urban and suburban areas. "Our scientific and technical understanding of what needs to be done to reduce excess nutrients going into the bay serves as a model for the nation," he said in a statement introducing the measure to the Senate.

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.

Twenty years after state and federal officials pledged to revive the troubled Chesapeake Bay, federal support for the nationally acclaimed restoration effort is eroding, environmentalists and bay managers say. The bay restoration has also lost momentum in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, the principal states of the Chesapeake watershed. Pollution, scientists say, must be reduced twice as much by 2010 as it was during the past two decades to meet restoration goals. The states' voluntary involvement makes strong oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency a necessity, advocates say. "But in the past two years, I feel EPA has become more a facilitator, playing defense when we need great leadership," says J. Charles Fox, who recently resigned as Maryland's natural resources secretary to work for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

THIS IS THE FIRST of two columns on Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and how Maryland's environment might fare if they were governor. First, some context. The internationally acclaimed Chesapeake Bay restoration, of which Maryland is a part, is in dire need of a jump-start, if not flirting with collapse. Fifteen years of work hasn't budged the bay's problems of extensive, deepwater "dead zones" and near-90 percent losses of underwater seagrasses critical to fish, waterfowl and crabs.

Maryland's oyster harvest for the season that ends Sunday is expected to be only 120,000 bushels - about one-third of last year's catch and the second-worst since recordkeeping began in 1870, state fishery managers say. A state scientist blamed two oyster parasites, MSX and Dermo, which thrive when Chesapeake Bay waters become super-salty. "Both of them are worse when we get higher salinity, and we've now had two, going on three years of drought," said Stephen Jordan, director of the state's Cooperative Oxford Laboratory.

Maryland will have to spend about $7 billion for the state to keep its promise to fully restore the Chesapeake Bay by 2010, according to a new analysis by top state officials. That's about $1 billion a year, the same amount the state spends to build roads and expand the Washington-area subway system. But the anticipated funding for bay restoration falls well short of the amount needed, said Chuck Fox, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources. If current levels of federal, state, local and private environmental spending continue through the rest of the decade, $4.4 billion will be available for bay restoration, leaving a $2.6 billion shortfall, Fox said.

REDMOND, Wash. - Over lunch at his home near Seattle, former Chesapeake scientist Donald Heinle recalls one of the clearest views anyone ever had of the bay. It was windless, late fall or early winter 1963, and Heinle was an observer aboard a military transport that had just scrubbed its mission of dropping paratroopers at Virginia's Fort A. P. Hill. The pilot wanted some flight hours under his belt anyhow, so he flew up and down the length of the Chesapeake. He opened the plane's huge rear cargo door, and for four hours Heinle, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, had an unparalleled view of the 2,500-square-mile estuary passing beneath him. He was not just seeing the bay that day. He was seeing the bottom of the bay - nearly all of it, everywhere but the narrow ship channel, ancient gorge of the Susquehanna River.