The Environmental Protection Agency tempered its once habitually optimistic updates on the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, finding that the ecosystem remains severely degraded despite all that's been done or said over the past 25 years.  Even so, there are those who think the picture is cloudier and darker than even the agency's gloomier new "Bay Barometer" paints it.

"I have questions," says Roy A. Hoagland, vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which issues its own yearly reports on the bay's status. 

Hoagland credits the bay program with shedding its penchant for rosy assessments, giving the Chesapeake an overall health rating of just 38 out of 100.  But he throws a "red flag" on some of the restoration claims made in the annual report released Thursday.

For instance, the report claims that overall, the states and federal government have achieved 61 percent of their restoration goals. It also says that since 1985, the governments have made 58 percent of the pollution reductions needed to restore the bay - an increase of 1 percentage point  since 2007. Hoagland points out that the progress must have been much greater in earlier years to reach that total.

Another head-scratcher is the statement that 64 percent of all the sediment runoff controls needed to help clear the bay's waters have been made.   But reductions of sediment from farmland are at only 48 percent of their goal, and mud from urban and suburban lands is going in the wrong direction - 61 percent worse, the report says.  It's not clear how those numbers fit together.

At least one of the bright spots highlighted looks a little less impressive when put in perspective.  More than 900 acres of oyster reefs were restored last year, the report says, bringing the effort to 70 percent of its goal of restoring nearly 2,500 acres of reefs between 2007 and 2010. 

However, those numbers are tiny when you consider that the bay once had more than 450,000 acres of oyster reefs.  Thanks to overharvesting in years gone by and rampant oyster diseases in recent decades, most of those reefs have been buried under a torrent of silt washing off the land.  The draft Environmental Impact Statement issued late last year on proposals to restore the bay's oysters estimates that the bay continues to lose nearly 2,700 acres of reefs every year - nearly three times what was restored last year.

Hoagland is not alone in questioning the EPA report.  William C. Dennison, who oversees a separate report card on the bay's health for the University of Maryland, says he thinks it's an improvement over past government assessments, but it's still too upbeat, given the declines in water quality he's seeing at various places around the bay.

"Right now I am still not convinced we are not having continuing degradation of bay health,'' he said.

Richard Batiuk, associate director of EPA's bay program, says there have been real pollution reductions, but they haven't been big enough to really budge the oxygen-deprived "dead zone" that makes much of the bay inhospitable to fish and shellfish.  It'll take a lot more reductions, and at least several more years, to see cleaner, clearer water, he says.

J. Charles "Chuck" Fox, the EPA administrator's new bay adviser, pledges to step up the pressure to show real progress, though given the past, he shied away yesterday from pledging that next year's report card would show dramatic improvements. 

You can read the EPA's full Bay Barometer report here, or get the highlights in the press release here.