ANNAPOLIS, Md. – State and federal leaders of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup have set a Dec. 31, 2025, deadline for officials to update the agreement that has governed the effort for more than a decade.
Most of the goals set in that agreement, which define regional objectives for everything from oyster restoration to pollution reduction to environmental education, have deadlines tied to 2025, but many are far off track.
The new directive requires the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program partnership to consider new goals for objectives that have been met and to reconsider goals and time frames for efforts that are coming up short, often by wide margins — including the long-running work to reduce nutrient pollution in the Bay and its rivers.
The leaders also created an Agricultural Advisory Committee to improve communication with the farm community, where states are focusing most of their future cleanup efforts.
The directives issued Dec. 10 at the annual meeting of the Chesapeake Executive Council, which sets Bay cleanup policy, were accompanied by bipartisan calls for state and federal officials to combat political uncertainties by making more tangible progress.
“This is a time we have to move unafraid,” said Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat who was re-elected to a second term as chair of the council at the meeting in Annapolis.
His Republican counterpart in Virginia echoed that sentiment.
“I have repeatedly urged us to address the needs of the Chesapeake Bay with great practicality and urgency,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said.
It marked the first time in a decade that at least three governors have attended the annual meeting of the Bay region’s leaders. Moore and Youngkin showed up in person while Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro appeared virtually because a blanket of fog scuttled his flight plans.
Moore was last year’s lone gubernatorial participant.
“I think [the attendance this year] says a lot at this really pivotal moment for the Bay,” said Choose Clean Water Coalition director Kristin Reilly.
The fog that enveloped much of the Bay region on the morning of the meeting served as a visual metaphor for concerns about the program’s future. Many worry that Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January could lead to renewed battles on Capitol Hill over the program’s funding and maybe even its existence.
The first Trump administration proposed severe cuts to the program all four years he was in office, with its first budget calling for the elimination of the Bay Program’s $73 million budget. Congress, though, continued backing the partnership at existing or higher funding levels.
In the wake of the Executive Council meeting, Reilly said, the hard part comes next: everyone following through on their promises. “We’re very interested to see implementation and how it actually plays out over the next couple of years,” she said. “It’s one thing to recommit [to the agreement], but it’s another thing to walk the walk.”
The council’s members include the governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, New York and Delaware; the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the mayor of the District of Columbia; and the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a bipartisan group representing state legislatures.
The council sets the top-line agenda for the Bay Program, which has guided efforts to revive the estuary for more than forty years. Despite billions of dollars in pollution-control investments, those efforts have met with mixed results, with major lags in reducing nutrient pollution from farms and urban stormwater runoff.
Many of the 31 goals outlined in the Bay Program’s current 2014 agreement face a deadline in 2025. Some have been achieved, such as those for large oyster restoration projects, land preservation and fish passage. But several of the most far-reaching objectives, such as those for reducing nutrient pollution, restoring wetlands and planting streamside forest buffers, are far off track.
It will mark the third time the partnership has come up short on meeting nutrient reduction goals, critical for reducing the oxygen starved “dead zone” in the Bay. Some worry that momentum will lose ground as other pressing environmental issues, particularly climate change, increasingly take center stage in the minds of the public and among advocacy groups.
The Executive Council’s Dec. 10 directive calls on the program’s Principals’ Staff Committee, which is composed of top state and federal environmental officials, to update the 2014 agreement. Under pressure from environmental advocates, language was added to the document urging regulators to make “every effort” to complete the revisions by the end of 2025, a year earlier than initially proposed.
Looking ahead, the amount of work is formidable. Performing the top-to-bottom update is likely to test the Bay Program’s longtime “consensus-based approached” like never before.
Debates during the past year have hinged on whether the Bay Program needs to shift its emphasis from improving the Bay’s deepest waters to addressing the water quality needs of people and living resources in the shallower, near-shore waters of the Bay and its rivers.
Many people involved with the cleanup effort, including some in the Bay Program itself, have come to embrace that more holistic approach, which the program’s scientific advisors laid out in a 2023 report. Improvements in shallow areas, they say, would be realized and appreciated more quickly.
Moore pointed to the report, entitled the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response, as a blueprint for future action.
“We’re making sure that the Chesapeake goals are focused on people and communities,” Moore said. “And we need to help areas where most people and wildlife interact with the Bay, and that means shallow waters along the coast.”
Youngkin said that when he was briefed about the Bay effort upon taking office in January 2022, he recognized that the partners would fall short of many of the 2025 targets. He found many of the goals to be “unclear.” And he said he had to work with lawmakers to ensure adequate state funding for some of the initiatives, such as a cost share program that helps farmers install pollution controls.
“We must pursue measures, not [computer] models, and set goals that are achievable,” Youngkin said.
Virginia state Del. David Bulova, chairman of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and a Democrat, also attended the meeting in person. The other governors and the EPA administrator sent representatives.
This year’s display of political force by the Executive Council is a “testament to the seriousness that the states are taking the partnership,” said Adam Ortiz, the head of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region.
The new Trump administration may replace Ortiz, a political appointee, soon after Inauguration Day. In an interview with the Bay Journal a few days before the December meeting, he said he wasn’t sure what his future holds. But he expressed pride in helping to put the Bay effort on stronger footer compared with when he was appointed in 2021.
At that time, the Bay cleanup was mired in a lawsuit pitting Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia against the EPA over its handling of water pollution originating in Pennsylvania. A settlement reached in 2023 required the agency to crack down on pollution from the state’s farms as well as its urban and suburban stormwater runoff.
“Things are going in the right direction after years of stagnation,” Ortiz said. “I think any administration would want to keep that momentum going.”
In addition to updating the 2014 agreement, the latest directive calls on officials to “streamline” the existing partnership to be more manageable for program staff.
The creation of the Agricultural Advisory Committee marks the Bay Program’s first new committee of its kind since the late 1980s.
Martha Shimkin, director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, described the establishment of the committee as “an important step to scaling up and targeting solutions” toward agricultural pollution.
At the signing event, though, there was little talk publicly about the goals that have been missed or what specifically would be done to achieve them. But if the gathering was short on details, it didn’t lack for rallying sentiments.
Shapiro appeared sitting in a brown chair on a video projected onto a screen next to the other participants. He ticked off several Pennsylvania accomplishments, including investing more than $1 billion in restoration efforts since 2019 and opening three state parks that led to the protection of 3,500 acres of land along Bay tributaries.
“Hear me on this — Pennsylvania is all in,” Shapiro said. “We’re at the table again … and I’m confident we will be able to make progress together.”