Consequences - or empty threats - for bay failure?
The Environmental Protection Agency has finally laid out what it may do if Maryland and other Chesapeake Bay states fail to do what they should to clean up the ailing estuary.
In a letter to the six states in the bay watershed and the District of Columbia, EPA's regional administrator said the agency could object to permits for new or expanded discharges into the bay and rivers, demand greater pollution reductions from existing industries and sewage treatment plants or take away some federal grants, among other things.
Not surprisingly, it's generating a mixture of reactions, from a Republican lawmaker suggesting it's unconstitutional to environmentalists saying they're weak or empty threats. You can read more about them here in a story I wrote today in The Baltlimore Sun.
Other reactions that didn't make the story:
"The chances of EPA's financial guillotine coming down are extremely slim," said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. Maryland, for instance, got all of $4.8 million last year in the kinds of grants that EPA could withhold or "redirect" if the state ducks its cleanup responsibilities.
Still, Swanson said, the threat of federal intervention in states issuing permits for new or expanded businesses and sewage plants is a sobering threat. "No one like to get their autonomy - and ability to serve their people uniquely - removed."
Tommy Landers of Environment Maryland emailed that he doesn't share EPA's confidence that states will meet their obligations and federal sanctions won't ever be needed. "That’s why these “consequences” are paramount in this process — empty threats won’t do anything to help the bay," he wrote.
While many of the proposed sanctions "could send the right signal to the states that the EPA means business," he added that he's disappointed that the agency seems to have retreated on restricting or prohibiting any new or expanded discharges if a state falls short.
"In September they proposed that option, and it’s a good one. But now they’re only talking about 'net improvement offsets,'" Landers said.
Gerald Winegrad, former Annapolis state senator and outspoken bay advocate, wrote that a group of 38 scientists, activists and former politicians he's assembled (more on them later) believes that EPA should start using the threat of sanctions now, with the two-year "milestones" that the states set last May for achieving by 2011. EPA's regional chief said he wouldn't apply them "retroactively."
"The politics of postponement must end now," Winegrad wrote in an email.
Still, the major question is what it will take for EPA to actually threaten or impose its rarely used powers. EPA's letter was vague on that score, beyond spelling out a timeline stretching out over four months in which the agency and state would spar back and forth over an alleged failing. EPA's regional chief, Shawn Garvin, insisted that such "flexiblity" was prudent, so that the punishment could fit the crime.
The bay commission's Swanson approves of that, saying she doesn't believe a state should be smacked for coming up short if it's really trying, particularly in today's lean fiscal climate.
"It wouldn't surprise me if the states' efforts are falling short of their current goals," she said. And the place where the strain will be felt the greatest, she added, is in growing areas of the bay region and those where farming still dominates.
EPA's announcement yesterday wasn't all threat - the agency did offer to provide $11.2 million in additional funds to help states tighten up their enforcement and regulatory oversight of polluters. That's likely to be welcome, but well short of the help from Washington that states are looking for. With their states' budgets imploding, Maryland and Virginia governors, for instance, wrote the White House recently to ask for $365 million more for the bay in next year's federal budget.
