Officials from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia said Wednesday that despite budget woes, the states are on track to hit near-term targets for reducing pollution fouling the Chesapeake Bay. But activists, who rallied in Annapolis on the eve of a bay summit in Baltimore, questioned the states' claims and called for federal pressure on them to take even stronger actions.
"The states have not been able to do it themselves, despite promises to do so," said William C. Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "Even their most recent milestones to be done by 2011 are behind."
Top officials from the Obama administration and the six states that drain into the Chesapeake are scheduled to gather downtown Thursday for their first meeting since unveiling plans for accelerating cleanup efforts over the next 15 years in two-year steps or "milestones."
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell are expected to join the Environmental Protection Agency's deputy administrator and officials from Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Delaware, New York and West Virginia for private lunchtime talks at the Living Classrooms Foundation. Afterward, they'll join students in working to restore a remnant wetland in the Inner Harbor and then hold a news conference.
In releasing their first interim cleanup plan last May, officials vowed to step up their efforts through next year to reduce the torrents of nitrogen and phosphorus fouling the bay from sewage plants, farm and lawn fertilizer, and air pollution. Those two nutrients, the active ingredients in plant food, trigger huge growths of algae in the bay every spring that rob the water of the oxygen that fish, crabs and oysters need.
At the halfway mark in the time states have for reaching their 2011 cleanup goals, Maryland officials said this week that the state has taken steps that should get 44 percent of the promised nitrogen reductions. Phosphorus reductions haven't been tallied yet, they say.
Natural Resources Secretary John R. Griffin said that a few of the cleanup efforts the state was counting on are coming up short, and state officials are scrambling to line up other measures to close the gap.
Perhaps most significantly, state officials have scaled back their goal of more than doubling the amount of croplands on which farmers plant "cover crops" to soak up the fertilizer left in the fields after fall harvest. Pollution experts say cover crops are one of the best methods for reducing runoff from farm fields, which is a leading source of the bay's water-quality woes. The crops are left in the fields through winter and killed back in the spring with herbicides to provide nutrients for a fresh planting of cash crops.
The number of acres planted in rye, barley and other nitrogen-absorbing crops increased only about 17 percent over the past two years, said Helen Stewart of DNR, and declined last year from the year before. The dropoff last fall stemmed largely from prolonged rainy weather that made fields too muddy to plant, officials have said.
But state officials also decided recently that their goal of getting more than 460,000 acres planted in cover crops by fall 2011 was unrealistic. The target has been reduced to 325,000 new acres, and officials say even that might be difficult to reach under the voluntary program, where farmers are paid up to $85 for every acre they plant in cover crops.
Agriculture officials have said they plan to boost the state's cover crops by proposing a regulation this year that would bar farmers from fertilizing any crop planted in the fall.
Other measures coming up short include upgrading the Salisbury sewage treatment plant and planting trees and other pollution buffers on public lands, DNR officials said.
State officials hope to close the gap with a handful of other efforts, including taking credit for pollution reductions not previously tallied from farm conservation practices and from commercial lawn care.
"I think we're fairly confident we're going to make it," DNR's Griffin said. However, he added, "we realize we're going to have to do more as time goes on."
Pennsylvania and Virginia officials reported similar progress and predicted they'd reach their 2011 pollution reduction targets.
"We believe we're pretty well on track to meet our milestone commitment," said John Hanger, Pennsylvania's secretary of environmental protection. The state has committed about $1.2 billion overall to upgrading sewage treatment plants that discharge into the Susquehanna River, the bay's largest tributary, and officials are stepping up efforts to get farmers to control runoff of fertilizer and manure.
Virginia officials likewise said that state is "more or less on track" to achieving its pollution reduction goals, though information was not available on what measures had been taken in the past year. Information won't be compiled until after the state's budget year ends June 30, and an update is likely in the fall, said Gary Waugh, spokesman for the state's Department of Conservation and Recreation.
But the bay foundation said Thursday that a spot check of pollution reduction efforts for all three states found shortcomings. In Virginia, the environmental group said, the state was 13 percent of the way by the end of last year toward its 2011 goal for getting more farmers to fence their cattle and other livestock out of streams.
Jack Frye, the state's director of soil and water conservation, said the 13 percent figure is dated, and he predicted more farmers would voluntarily fence their livestock over the next 18 months because of appeals from farm trade groups and offers of state funds to help pay for the fencing.
But Frye also noted that the state's budget woes have reduced — from $20 million to $9 million — the cost-share funds the state can offer to help farmers pay for pollution-reduction measures.
Charles "Chuck" Fox, the EPA's senior adviser for the bay, said federal officials can't tell yet whether states really are making progress toward reducing bay pollution.
"I have no reason to believe what the states have said is not true," he added.
But when called to the microphone at a rally in Annapolis by activists and others demanding more aggressive cleanup efforts, Fox vowed that the Obama administration would press for "real progress" in restoring the Chesapeake. Obama issued an executive order last year calling for federal leadership to clean up what he called a "national treasure."
"We're not pleased with the progress to date," he said. States are expected to submit longer-range cleanup plans later this year spelling out how they expect to restore the bay by 2025, and Fox said that under a court-imposed pollution "diet" being prepared by federal regulators, those plans would be "enforceable and binding" on states.
At the rally, a group of more than 50 activists, scientists and former politicians and policymakers called on federal and state officials to accelerate the Chesapeake restoration effort by adopting 25 measures they said are vital for reducing pollution from farms, urban and suburban lands — most if not all of them regulatory in nature.
Former Annapolis state Sen. Gerald Winegrad, a lead organizer, said mandatory pollution controls are needed now to make real progress because the bay restoration has lagged for decades under largely voluntary, cooperative efforts among the states and federal government.
And former state Sen. Bernie Fowler of Southern Maryland, another longtime advocate for the bay, warned that the latest push to restore the bay could falter amid political opposition to increased regulation or fees to pay for cleanup. He also said he worried that the Gulf of Mexico oil leak could divert federal attention and funding from the bay's less dramatic but similarly severe problems.
A passionate runner at age 86, Fowler likened the bay's 27-year-old cleanup effort to a relay race, one in which he said the Obama administration has the final deciding leg to run.
"This may be the last race you'll ever be able to run to save this precious resource," Fowler said.