Months ahead may determine Chesapeake Bay’s fate

The Chesapeake Bay is too beautiful for its own good.

If its waters caught fire, as the oil-slick Cuyahoga River famously did in Cleveland in 1969, or if stinky waste coated its surface, an outraged public would demand fast action.

But the pollutants strangling the bay -- nitrogen, phosphorus and old-fashioned dirt -- are not sexy. They do their damage slowly, out of sight, below the surface.

Twenty-six years after federal and state governments agreed the clean the bay, the nation's largest estuary remains in miserable shape.

Today, regulators are mounting a new effort to restore the Chesapeake. Decisions made during the next few months, longtime observers say, could determine whether the bay recovers or wastes away.

"We are at the precipice," said Ann Jennings, Virginia director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group.

President Barack Obama called the bay a "national treasure" in May and directed the Environmental Protection Agency to take tough actions to clean it.

If that crackdown doesn't happen, the bay may be doomed, Jennings said. More years would slide by as we breed a generation of Virginians who don't remember a healthy bay. And that would translate into diminished support for the country's largest estuary.

So far, the cleanup has failed largely because it relied too much on voluntary actions, said Howard R. Ernst, a U.S. Naval Academy political scientist.

It's time to force -- not entice -- polluters to clean up, Ernst said. The White House and the six bay states, all of which have Democrats as their chief executives, need to act before they are distracted by the 2010 congressional campaigns, he said.

"There has never been a better political environment to push for something big for the Chesapeake. . . . If the bay leaders cannot give the cleanup program real teeth in the next six months, it is likely that they never will."

Obama officials this month laid out preliminary plans for restoring the bay, calling for better controls on runoff pollution from farms, cities and suburbs, among other things.

J. Charles Fox, Obama's senior adviser to the EPA for bay issues, said the plans are quite fluid. Now comes the hard work of figuring out specifically how to reduce the pollution.

But, Fox added, "we are very serious about improving the accountability and performance of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program."

The Richmond Times-Dispatch examined the plight and fate of the bay by addressing four key questions.

How did we get here?

The bay is a source of seafood, a home for wildlife, and a place for people to play. Experts have estimated its financial value, even in its degraded state, at more than $1 trillion annually. And that doesn't include the value of a sunset or a vee of migrating geese.

Federal and bay-state officials pledged in 1983 to clean up the Chesapeake. Four years later, they vowed to finish the job by 2000.

That didn't happen, but no one got punished. Instead, officials set a 2010 cleanup deadline.

Realizing that deadline, too, would be missed, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, members of the Obama administration and other officials announced in May yet another deadline, 2025 -- not for a clean bay but for programs to be in place that someday would clean the bay.

A quarter-century after the cleanup program began, the bay is worse in many ways.

Oysters have declined to about 1 percent of 19th-century levels. Waters have gotten murkier. Crab numbers dropped so low that the federal government declared the fishery a national disaster last year, although there has been some recent improvement.

The Naval Academy's Ernst called the bay "an ecological zombie . . . not quite dead, certainly not alive, but some grotesque shadow of what it used to be."

One of the bay's killers is population growth, which brings more pollution and destroys natural areas such as forests that absorb contaminants.

The bay's watershed -- the area in which streams run toward the bay -- covers parts of Virginia, Maryland, four other states and the District of Columbia.

The population in that region grew from 13.2 million in 1983 to 16.9 million today, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program, the EPA-led cleanup effort. About 87,000 people move into the region each year. Nearly 20 million are projected to live there by 2030.

Cleanup officials must decide soon how to reduce pollution enough to offset the effects of that growth, said L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources.

"Many people recognize this sense of urgency, including the Obama administration. . . . They know that somewhere relatively near on the time horizon is a tipping point for bay restoration."

That point is long gone for thousands of watermen who have lost their jobs.

"It's a dying breed," said Lester Jenkins, 41, of Gloucester County, who continues to make ends meet fishing for crabs and eels.

Taking a break from washing his crab pots outside his Guinea-area trailer, Jenkins said: "As far as a young person getting on the water, I wouldn't advise it."

What's the problem?

Nitrogen and phosphorus are nutrients -- good in proper doses. But the bay is getting an overdose, causing the growth of algae that steal oxygen from the water and create "dead zones" unfit for fish and crabs.

About one-fifth of those nutrients comes from sewage-treatment plants and factories. But the majority comes from polluted runoff -- fertilizer, manure and other waste that washes off farms, lawns and streets.

In recent years, Virginia has required numerous sewage plants to reduce nutrient releases. But cutting pollution from a pipe is easier than reducing that widespread runoff.

In Virginia, the amount of nitrogen flowing into the bay has been cut by nearly 20 million pounds since 1985. With the toughest cleanup work ahead, and population continuing to grow, Virginia needs to cut roughly another 20 million pounds.

Bob and Jean Tanner, both in their early 80s, moved in 1976 to a bayfront home on Gwynn's Island in Mathews County. Bob Tanner said he has seen numerous changes, including the disappearance of oysters. "We used to just walk around and pick them up."

Tanner said he's optimistic the bay can be restored, "but I don't think we'll be here to see it."

What now?

In laying out their preliminary cleanup plans Sept. 10, Obama officials said the EPA will punish states that don't do enough to cut pollution -- by withholding federal grant money, for example.

That would be a huge change. In the past, there were no consequences for missing cleanup deadlines.

"Virginia not only must keep doing what we've done, but we'll need to step it up a bit if we want to keep EPA out of our knickers," said Bryant, the secretary of natural resources.

Federal and state regulators still must discuss ways to get farmers, homeowners and builders to reduce the flow of pollutants off their lands, said Fox, the Obama official.

The administration is to prepare a more detailed cleanup proposal in November and, after hearing the public's comments, release a final version in May.

Another, much-anticipated cleanup blueprint -- a document that will spell out who has to reduce pollution and by how much -- is expected to come out in late 2010 or early 2011. Federal and state officials are working on that.

Rough estimates indicate that about $6 billion has been spent so far on the bay cleanup, about $1.5 billion from Virginia. Actually restoring the Chesapeake could cost an additional $20 billion or more, plus yearly expenditures after that to maintain the bay's health.

But a restored bay could yield even greater financial benefits through improved fishing industries, tourism, beaches and real estate values, according to Fox.

Farmers say they have done a lot to cut pollution voluntarily. Builders say they are being asked to reduce runoff after years of being required to construct wide roads and other features that worsen the problem.

"We think that there's been a target painted on our back," said Barrett Hardiman, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Home Builders Association of Virginia, at a recent forum at The Times-Dispatch.

Why hasn't the bay been cleaned?

The Naval Academy's Ernst argues that cleaning the bay is not a scientific problem -- we know how to cut the pollution -- but a political one.

Numerous polls have shown that people support cleaning the bay. But Ernst said politicians have been able to mollify the public by announcing incremental accomplishments -- a bit of funding here, a new program there -- while the bay languishes overall.

If much more time passes, the bay will become too polluted -- and too expensive -- to clean, Ernst said. If the Obama plans are indeed tough, affected groups such as builders and farmers surely will oppose them.

"We're not talking about another program to educate school kids," Ernst said. "We're talking about something in which there is going be winners and losers.

"It's real hardball politics, and it's a level of discussion we haven't had in this area in a generation."

Contact Rex Springston at (804) 649-6453 or .