Enviro officials, advocates make Bay push on Hill
Officials from state government and environmental organizations are pushing for a stepped-up federal role in fighting pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, calling the start of a new, potentially more environment-friendly administration in Washington the right time to act.
They found a receptive audience among Democratic members of the Maryland delegation, who invited them to a 90-minute discussion in a Senate hearing room on Thursday afternoon.
“I organized this meeting to proclaim that it’s a new day for the Bay,” said Barbara A. Mikulski, the state’s senior senator.
But as speaker after speaker pointed out, it's same-old, same-old when it comes to identifying the sources of the problem and the solutions. What also hasn't changed is the remedy.
Turning things around will require breathtaking sums of money and a level of coordination among various arms of government that doesn’t currently exist.
Everything that’s been done at the local, state and national level to help restore the Bay is “well-intended, but we’re not getting the results we need,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, who held a similar future-of-the-Bay session earlier in the week in Annapolis.
Cardin intends to propose updating a section of the Clean Water Act in an effort to give the federal government greater authority to reduce pollution and improve the health of the Bay.
Earlier this week, at the Annapolis hearing, J. Charles Fox, newly appointed senior advisor to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson for the Chesapeake Bay and Anacostia River, said the agency would “consider adopting new tools to improve the health of the Chesapeake and its tributaries.”
That presumably refers to the sorts of tougher legal tools that Cardin envisions and several of those at the hearing endorsed, at least in general terms.
A representative of Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration, state Environment secretary Shari T. Wilson, wants Congress to hold states accountable for the promises they've made to double the rate of current cleanup efforts. She also advocated doubling the budget for EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, currently about $20 million a year.
Kim Coble, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, who also endorsed giving EPA more authority over the Bay, said cleanup by states in the Bay watershed to coordinate their cleanup efforts have often been ineffective.
“With rare exceptions, the six states have made their own plans and programs independent of one another. Shared responsibility is no responsibility,” Coble said in a written statement.
The Bay Foundation is advocating that EPA consider using its existing authority to stop the issuance of permits to projects that would add more nitrogen or phosphorus pollution to the Cheseapeake ecosytem. That idea has not been endorsed by the state and was not discussed by lawmakers at the informal hearing.
One of the most cost-effective things the feds can do, the panelists agreed, is pump more money into the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant in the District of Columbia.
Wilson said upgrading Blue Plains is “probably the largest single action” that could be taken to help the Bay.
Blue Plains is the biggest single source of nitrogen discharges into the Bay, officials said. It is responsible for nearly 4 million pounds of the roughly 100 million pounds of nitrogen each year that severely degrades water quality.
Making a pitch for more federal dollars, a representative of the Chesapeake Bay Commission described Blue Plains as “the nation’s sewage treatment plant,” citing its location (just across the Anacostia from downtown DC). The facility treats all of DC’s wastewater as well as portions from southern Maryland and Virginia.
The price tag for upgrading technology at the plant? $3.2 billion. Several members of the Maryland delegation have requested $135 million in earmarked federal funds for Blue Plains in 2010. That would supplement money from the two states and DC, which have already spent almost $700 million over the last ten years.
Panelists and lawmakers also saw opportunities in the upcoming rewrite of the federal highway law, a priority this year for Congress. They discussed adding provisions that would require newly constructed roadways to built in ways that would capture and filter runoff, a major and growing source of Bay pollution.
Mikulski, who chaired the session, attended by six of the state’s senators and congressmen, declared that “every bill is a Bay bill” and said Maryland lawmakers needed to leverage their positions on key committees to push Bay-cleanup measures.
