Summer's over, school's back in session, and the states' first major homework assignment is due today (Sept. 1) in the new Chesapeake Bay cleanup drive being directed by the federal government.
The six bay watershed states and District of Columbia are supposed to be submitting draft "watershed implementation plans" to the Environmental Protection Agency spelling out how they expect to reduce pollution enough to restore the Chesapeake's troubled water quality.
Once EPA has those plans -- from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, DC, Delaware, New York and West Virginia -- it will put the finishing touches on a baywide "pollution diet" parsing out how each state must reduce nutrients and sediment flowing into the bay's tributaries. It's a big deal, because the diet will require more costly upgrades of wastewater treatment plants, and greater efforts by farmers and urban and suburban communities to control polluted storm runoff.
Maryland, one of the three major bay states, expects to get its plan in by mid-afternoon, says Dawn Stoltzfus, communications director for the Maryland Department of the Environment.
But an EPA source says Virginia officials have said theirs won't be ready until sometime Friday. A spokesman for Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality said today he was checking on the status of the state's plan.
(UPDATE 1:30 pm EDT: Jon Capacasa, EPA's mid-Atlantic water protection director, confirmed in a telephone briefing for reporters that Virginia officials had requested a two-day extension "to make sure the governor and senior folks in the administration support the strategy." The EPA official said he didn't know why the state needed more time to get the governor's backing,but called the request "reasonable" and said it shouldn't disrupt the agency's work.)
It's not clear if this is just a production glitch, or a sign of looming trouble. Virginia's Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell wrote EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson earlier this summer expressing his opposition to expanded federal regulation on the bay, saying the feds should be working with farmers rather than riding herd on them. Many are speculating that the EPA pollution diet will spark lawsuits objecting to its requirements and to the federal government's authority to impose them on state and local governments.