ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Proposed revisions to the plan that guides the Chesapeake Bay cleanup fall short of what many experts and environmental advocates want to see.
The draft document weakens several targets in place since 2014, including goals for restoring wetlands and establishing new public access points. Some goals provide only an X for amounts instead of real numbers, leaving crucial numerical objectives to be decided months or even years into the future. And, while many tasks face their own deadlines, there is no cutoff date by which the entire suite of initiatives must be completed.
“My initial thought was this was very incomplete,” said Keisha Sedlacek, senior policy director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “While the goals and outcomes included are the right ones, there is less accountability and detail than we were anticipating.”
The Chesapeake Bay Program, the state-federal collaboration that has overseen the cleanup since 1983, released an 18-page revised version of the 2014 Bay agreement for public comment on July 1. The program’s Executive Council is set to vote on a finalized draft in December.
The deadline to submit feedback is Sept. 1. Through mid-August, the program had received more than 250 comments, many of them highly critical of its contents.
The lack of an overall deadline is one of the biggest flash points.
The 2014 document set 2025 as the deadline for achieving most of its goals. The Bay Program has admitted it won’t meet many of those targets, including the nutrient and sediment pollution reductions at the heart of the effort.
Unlike the 2014 agreement on which it’s based, the revised draft contains no single endpoint. Instead, many of its goals are tied to different years, such as 2035 and 2040. The inclusion of multiple timescales, critics say, could sow confusion in the public and hamper efforts to hold the program accountable for its progress.
“We need a timeline for a holistic evaluation of what we’re doing,” Sedlacek said. The Bay Foundation suggests setting a “uniform deadline” of 2035 for all goals with formal check-ins conducted every two years until then.
The program’s scientific advisors have signaled their support for an all-encompassing deadline but not if it means arbitrarily shifting goal-specific deadlines. Such targets are rooted not in politics, they say, but rather in a scientific understanding of what it takes to hit a target on time.
The draft also is coming under fire for its inclusion of X as placeholders for target totals. Ten goals are missing finalized numbers. For example, the tree-planting goal currently calls for planting and maintaining “X acres of new forests”; the brook trout goal seeks to reduce identified threats by “X%.”
Three more goals — acid mine drainage, waterbirds and updated water-quality targets — point to the need to develop plans to meet those objectives.
The plan’s authors say the blanks are the result of working under a compressed timeline. Last December, the Executive Council charged the partnership with making “every effort” to complete “most” revisions by the end of this year. An initial proposal to finalize the document by the end of 2026 was criticized as lacking urgency.
“We’re up against the clock,” said Anna Killius, co-chair of the committee writing the draft and executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group that represents state legislatures on Bay issues.
The Bay Program’s staff say they expect to have numbers for 4 of the 13 incomplete goals in time for the Executive Council meeting. That would take protected lands, forest protection, tree planting and acid mine drainage off their to-do list.
But in nine others the X will remain after the agreement is signed. Current estimates suggest that several won’t be settled until the end of 2027, including acreage targets for protecting tribal lands, agricultural lands, community greenspaces and natural lands that support stream health.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which coordinates the Bay Program, said in a statement that “the revisions to the Agreement are being made jointly by the CBP Partnership, informed by the public and stakeholders — these are not unilateral EPA actions or decisions. The draft revisions, including placeholder targets, reflect collective decisions and are open for public feedback to ensure transparency and engagement.”
Some observers say the blanks reflect the Bay Program’s longtime embrace of “adaptive management,” which allows for adjusting approaches over time based on evolving scientific knowledge. But several Bay cleanup experts say they are uneasy about letting placeholders gain a foothold in the program’s most important document.
“It’s like I’m signed out to get a loan, but I’m not going to say what my loan amount is,” said Verna Harrison, a longtime Bay cleanup official and former assistant secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Meanwhile, a letter from four of the Bay’s leading scientists calls the draft agreement a “seeming abandonment of the commitment to restore water quality.” The letter’s authors are Donald Boesch and Walter Boynton of the University of Maryland, Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Robert Howarth of Cornell University. (Boesch also serves as a member of the Bay Journal’s Board of Directors.)
If approved as amended, the new agreement wouldn’t be the first to lack hard numerical targets for reducing water pollution. But it would represent a step back from the 2014 agreement, which tied reductions to a then-new EPA mandate for watershed states and localities to follow a “pollution diet.” That action set legally enforceable limits on nutrients and sediment spilling into the estuary.
The draft revisions commit states to continue working toward current nutrient reduction commitments. New timelines and targets won’t be established until 2030, when new computer models are expected to be available, which are likely to require greater nutrient reduction efforts.
This language leaves the impression of a “weakening of the commitment” to reduce pollution, the four scientists say, and they suggest setting a 2035 deadline for putting in place controls to meet the existing pollution diet goals and recalibrating those goals when the new modeling is ready in 2030. Those standards should then remain in effect until 2050, they say.
Killius disputes that the draft waters down the EPA’s pollution limits, also known as the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load, or “TMDL.” “The agreement cannot change the TMDL,” she said, “because that is a regulatory thing under the Clean Water Act.”