Report calls for "tough love" to save the bay
A Washington-based think tank is calling for what sounds like "tough love" to save the Chesapeake Bay from the 26-year trail of broken promises left by federal and state officials, who have repeatedly failed to meet self-imposed deadlines for cleaning up North America's largest estuary.
The Center for Progressive Reform argues that if Maryland and other bay states fail to meet the new two-year bay cleanup "milestones" they set for themselves in May, the Environmental Protection Agency should be required to take tough action against them, including barring any new sewage plants or industrial discharges, taking back federal clean-water funds and revoking the states' regulatory authority.
And if EPA blanches at taking tough steps to keep the cleanup on track, the center argues that citizens and environmental groups should be free to sue to force the agency to act.
"Without something like this, without consequences that people are really afraid of, nothing’s going to change," argues Rena Steinzor, president of the center and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.
The states and federal government have spent roughly $4 billion on bay restoration over the decades, but the Cheseapeake remains "severely degraded," the center says, with little or no improvement in water quality overall. The states and federal government originally pledged to reduce nutrient pollution by 2000, then extended the deadline to 2010, and aren't even close. Officials picked a new "end date" of 2025 last month, but also promised to step up the pace by adopting a series of short-term "milestones" every two years.
While the bay region's population growth has made it harder to stem the influx of nutrient pollution, the main problem has been the non-binding nature of the bay cleanup effort, Steinor and Jones argue.
The EPA has been "missing in action," the report says, unable or unwilling to use its legal authority to require cleanup, and with no one really responsible for the bay's restoration, no one's to blame when it fails, either.
The center's report comes as members of Congress weigh renewing the federal law authorizing the Chesapeake Bay Program, officially dubbed a federal-state "partnership." Maryland's delegation and others want to give EPA more specific duties and power over the states' efforts, while also holding the federal agency more accountable as well.
The "tough-love" recommendations were welcomed by William Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The Annapolis-based environmental group sued EPA earlier this year, accusing the federal government of shirking its legal responsibility for restoring the bay. The suit is still pending, but Baker said the penalties proposed by Steinzor's centers are similar to what environmentalists would like to see.
"Many of these are things we think EPA not only has the authority to do right now, but the responsibility to do right now," Baker said.
J. Charles Fox, the EPA administrator's senior advisor on the Chesapeake, was more noncommittal. Though he said he hadn't had a chance to read the report yet, he called it "very timely." In response to President Obama's executive order last month directing EPA to take a stronger role in the cleanup, Fox said, "we are considering a range of consequences under current law, as well as changes to policies or regulations."
For background on the center's report, go here.
Comments
I suppose I should spend some time reading this report to find out if there is something of substance here.
But let's see.... The only new sewage plants being built (in Maryland at least) are being built to reduce nutrient loads. It makes perfect sense to me that the Bay Program and Foundation would reduce that program for some reasons of 'punishment'. As for industrial discharges, in a bad economy they are going to make the few industrial permits being requested harder to get?
What unbelievable stupidity.
I suppose Chuck Fox IS noncommittal. I am thankful for that at least.
Typical academic claptrap. If it is worth taking seriously, which I doubt, it would be frightening in its short-sightedness.
Posted by: Jim Noonan | June 15, 2009 10:54 PM