The Obama administration and the House Republican leadership appear set to tussle over federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort - along with almost every other environmental program.
While proposing to trim overall funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, the president's budget for fiscal 2012 requests $67.4 million for EPA's Chesapeake Bay program - $4.4 million more than he proposed for this year and $17 million above what the agency actually received in fiscal 2010.
According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, his spending plan also included an increase in federal funding for upgrading Washington's Blue Plains sewage treatment plant, the bay's largest, from $20 million last year to $25 million next year. Though not specifically for the bay, overall federal conservation program funding - a portion of which would go to this region - would increase to $3.6 billion, up from $2.9 billion in 2010.
The Republican-dominated House, though, has other ideas, bidding to cut this year's bay funding along with the rest of EPA's budget. (With Congress unable to agree on a budget for the current year, the federal government has been operating under a continuing funding resolution.)
Under cuts proposed by the House Appropriations Committee, EPA's Bay program would dip 20 percent to $40 million, while Blue Plains funding would be halved. Other environmental and conservation programs, in which this region would share, also would get pared back. Most notably, EPA's clean-water revolving fund, which helps states and communities finance upgrades to sewage treatment plants, would be cut by two-thirds, from $2.1 billion last year to $690 million. The president proposed about a 30 percent reduction, to $1.55 billion.
Not surprisingly, the Annapolis-based bay foundation favors the Obama administration's plan to increase spending on the Chesapeake restoration effort over the "devastating cuts" the House would make not just in bay cleanup funding but in all clean-water programs.
(News cameras record workers on Capitol Hill stacking Obama administration's 2012 budget. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)