Leaders of Chesapeake Bay organizations went to Capitol Hill on Thursday, calling for more money and accountability as tens of millions in federal stimulus dollars flood into restoring the ailing watershed.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., brought state representatives from Maryland and Virginia and Bay community leaders together to strategize the individual legislation, such as the Clean Air Act, which lacks penalties if states do not ensure that it is fully implemented.
“Every bill is a Bay bill,” Mikulski said.
Kim Cobe, director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the future of the watershed depended on “better leadership.” Accountability has been the “one piece that has been missing.”
For Anne Swanson, director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, lawmakers are sending “money in the right direction.”
She said that the farm bill, tripling agriculture and water support, is the “biggest win that I have seen” in curing the estuary. But, she asked the representatives to be vigilant with Chesapeake dollars. “States have a hard time punishing themselves,” Swanson said. “That’s where the federal government comes in.”
Environmental officials were especially concerned with reducing pollution draining into the Bay from highway runoff by adding storm water requirements to the Surface Transportation Act.
Roads should be retrofitted to curb the waste, said Secretary Shari Wilson of the Maryland Department of the Environment.
Wilson said her department has upgraded requirements for storm water and septic systems. The department would “ramp up that effort significantly,” and the federal government should do the same, she added.
The Bay program has been allocated nearly $20 million in stimulus funding over a decade. Wilson said the funding should be at least doubled.
The panel agreed, specifically asking lawmakers to boost funds to the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. The plant serves the Washington area and discharges nearly 4 million pounds of harmful nitrogen each year.
State and federal government have spent $835 million on the $3.2 billion facility in the past decade, but the environmental officials asked for more.
Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said that the funding was netting dividends, with the Bay’s blue crab population nearly doubling.
