Better late than never? Bay cleanup "barometer" on hold
The "Bay Barometer," an annual report card on the health of the Chesapeake Bay and the efforts to restore it, is missing in action.
It was scheduled for release last month, but got held up at the last minute. Shawn Garvin, the Environmental Protection Agency's Mid-Atlantic regional administrator, said in an email to officials from Maryland and other bay region states that a key component of the annual update, the assessment of progress over the past year in bay restoration efforts, had not been completed.
"We want to make sure we get it right, of course," said Margaret Enloe, spokeswoman for the Chesapeake Bay Program, the restoration "partnership" of EPA, bay states and the District of Columbia. EPA officials are in the process of revising a computer simulation, or model, that's used to calculate how much nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollution has been reduced across the six-state bay watershed.
"Until that model is ready to run again," she said, "we are not going to have those numbers."
The "Barometer" released last spring found that in 2009 the bay's health had improved modestly - about six percent - while efforts to improve water quality and protect wildlife habitats and manage fisheries had made only incremental gains overall, to about 62 percent of restoration goals.
But the calculation of how much progress has been made on cleaning up nutrient and sediment pollution likely will change with a revised computer model. Enloe said if the model is ready to go soon, officials hope to be able to release the Barometer "sometime in mid-year."
While the Barometer is stuck in study hall, the public isn't exactly in the dark about how the bay is doing. The annual bay health report card put out by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, released as usual a few weeks ago, found that the Chesapeake's overall condition had slipped slightly in 2010 for the first time in four years. It graded the bay's health at C-minus, or "moderately poor."
The Bay Program has parceled out some info that's part of the annual Barometer report - reporting a 7 percent decline last year in Bay grasses, and the results of an eight-year sampling of thousands of streams and rivers in the six-state watershed, which found 45 percent in fair to excellent shape and 55 percent in poor to very poor condition for sustaining fish populations.
Given the other measures of bay health out there, and the sea-change in the bay restoration effort this past year with the imposition by EPA of a baywide pollution diet, one wonders why bother with the Barometer?
Enloe said Bay Program officials have actually talked about whether to continue the annual report, but felt at least one more was needed, if only to take stock of progress in achieving the bay restoration goals that were supposed to have been reached by the end of last year. That was the deadline set in 2000 for completing the bay restoration effort begun in 1983.
As Karl Blankenship of the Chesapeake Bay Journal notes in recent article, a few of the more than 100 commitments made in that 2000 bay restoration agreement have been achieved. A fifth of the six-state watershed's land has been preserved from development, and dams have been removed reopening more than 1,000 miles of rivers for migratory fish to spawn as they once did. But many more pledges, such as rebuilding the bay's depleted oyster population or restoring thousands of acres of lost wetlands, have not.
With EPA taking a leading and more regulatory role in directing what once had been a voluntary, mostly state-led restoration effort, the Bay Program finds itself at a crossroads, Blankenship writes. So it's no surprise, perhaps, that the annual report on how the bay restoration is going is hung up there, too.
(Bay Bridge, 2008 Baltimore Sun photo by Doug Kapustin)
