Saving the Chesapeake

Creating an Accountability Mechanism for the Chesapeake Bay

A national treasure, the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America, home to more than 3,600 species of plants and animals. The Chesapeake Bay watershed – the land that drains into the Bay – encompasses parts of six states and WashingtonD.C. Approximately 17 million people live in the watershed, and more than 100,000 streams, creeks, and rivers drain into the Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay has been deteriorating since the 1930s, when water clarity, crab and oyster populations, and underwater bay grasses began to decline. Excess nutrients – phosphorus and nitrogen – and sediment runoff from agriculture, urban and suburban development, and sewage treatment plants caused the Bay’s cloudy waters, resulting in “dead zones” containing too little oxygen to support aquatic life. The Bay’s oyster population has been devastated, down to 2 percent of its average levels in the 1950s. The Bay’s famous blue crab populations are also low, about 30 percent below the annual average from 1968 to 2002.

Established in 1983 in response to increasing public concern about the state of the Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Program is the nation’s oldest estuary restoration program. Agreements among Bay program partners (Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and EPA are the primary partners, with West Virginia, New York, and Delaware agreeing to certain water quality goals) define the Bay program’s goals. The most recent agreement, Chesapeake 2000, set out more than 102 commitments, organized under five broad restoration goals. The goals were ambitious. For example, Chesapeake 2000 set a goal of correcting Bay’s nutrient and sediment problems so as to remove the Bay from the impaired waters list under the Clean Water Act by 2010. 

Yet the state of the Bay’s health is grave, and most of the goals established in Chesapeake 2000 are not close to being met. The Chesapeake Bay Health and Restoration Assessment, which was released by the Bay program in March 2008, concluded that “most of the Bay’s waters are degraded.” In 2007, the Bay was only 21 percent of the way toward meeting water quality goals.  According to the Assessment, “based on available data, Bay program scientists project that little more than half of the pollution reduction efforts needed to achieve nutrient goals have been undertaken since 1985.” 

Since 2005, the Program has faced increased scrutiny from the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the Inspector General for EPA for not having a comprehensive implementation strategy and for not effectively and credibly reporting the state of the Bay’s restoration progress. In response to the GAO report, in 2008, the Senate and House Appropriations Committees withheld $5 million from the program until EPA implements GAO’s recommendations. 

In response, the Bay program and its state partners are considering ways to reorganize the program and increase accountability. Some of the discussions have included creating an independent entity to monitor the performance of the program and hold EPA and the states accountable for their efforts to reduce nutrient loading in the Bay.  

Working with an ad hoc committee of the Bay program’s Principals’ Staff Committee, the Center for Progressive Reform provided recommendations to help establish a framework for the accountability mechanism. Part of CPR’s participation in this effort included interviewing key stakeholders to gain insight into how they perceive the program’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as their thoughts about various ways to improve program effectiveness in meeting goals such as increasing oyster and crab populations, reducing agricultural runoff, and reducing overfishing and addressing possible jurisdictional and regulatory problems preventing the program from achieving its statutory mission. An Accountability Mechanism for the Chesapeake Bay: Interview Findings, by CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst Shana Jones, distills CPR’s findings.   (Also available is Steinzor and Campbell's memoranda on options for a proposed office charged with holding EPA and the state partners accountable, and on proposed metrics for accountability.)

The Chesapeake Bay Program’s recognition that it must make hard choices and shift from a tone of mutual celebration to one of enforceable expectations is a landmark in its institutional maturation. This unique project represents the first comprehensive and independent assessment of how high-level policymakers and Bay advocates believe the Bay program should work to ensure that restoration goals are met.