A day after politicians haggled over how to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, the regulators are taking their turn at bat. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to hand out today the Chesapeake Bay nutrient pollution limits that Maryland, the five other bay states and the District of Columbia will have to meet in coming years.
(Update: Full story here.)
It's the beginning of a bureaucratic ballet the EPA and bay states will act out over the next six months, but a dance with serious consequences.
Federal regulators have laid out a series of steps to be taken in coming weeks and months to finish putting the Chesapeake on a "pollution diet," known bureaucratically as a "total maximum daily load." Today is for the distribution of limits for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution - from sewage, air pollution and runoff from farms and urban and suburban lands - that stimulate algae blooms and trigger the bay's summer "dead zone." On Aug. 15, the states will get similar limits to achieve on sediment, the silt that clouds the water and prevents fish-harboring underwater grasses from growing.
Today's limits come on the heels of approval in Washington by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee of a compromise bill meant to strengthen the lagging 26-year restoration effort. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., agreed to drop any reference to the "pollution diet" in the bill he'd introduced to appease Republicans concerned about a broadening of federal authority to regulate water pollution, especially runoff from farms and urban and suburban lands. That provision had been seen by some as needed to buttress the EPA's legal right to impose sanctions on states if they fail to do their part to clean up the bay. Even with that and other concessions, it's far from certain this or any bay bill will pass Congress this year.
Legislative backing or no, the EPA is committed to going forward. It has to under the settlement of a federal lawsuit brought years ago by environmental groups accusing the federal government of failing to impose a pollution diet on the bay, as called for in the Clean Water Act when pollution impairs the use and enjoyment of a water body. Even so, regulators say this is the largest and most complex pollution diet the federal government has ever drafted, spread across six states encompassing 17 million people, nearly 500 major sewage plants and some 88,000 farms.
Once given the cleanup targets they have to reach, Maryland and the other states will have just a few weeks to finish drafting plans outlining how they intend to reach those pollution limits. The states' "watershed implementation plans" are to be submitted to the EPA by Sept. 1.
Then, with barely three weeks to review the states' plans, the EPA has committed to issuing its draft pollution diet for the bay and its tributaries by Sept. 24. The agency will give the public 45 days from then to comment on the whole shebang, then require states to submit final plans by Nov. 29.
The feds will wrap up the whole bureaucratic ballet by formally establishing a "total maximum daily load" for the bay by Dec. 31. That'll spell out the recipe and schedule the states must follow in seeking to restore the bay, with EPA waiting in the wings to hold states accountable - possibly even withholding federal funds or development permits - if the states fail to hit their marks.
It's all a paper exercise at this point, with scientists and bureaucrats haggling over numbers. But those plans and figures will force action -- and consequences if actions fall short. Unless, of course, some state or industry feels it's being unfairly imposed on in this new effort to clean up the bay and goes to court challenging the federal government's authority to do all this. The final act hasn't been written for this show, so it's not clear how it will end. Stay tuned.
(Crabs caught near Ridge, MD. 2008 Baltimore Sun photo by Glenn Fawcett)