Local governments along the Chesapeake Bay watershed might finally get the necessary tools to enforce pollution limits, as new Bay restoration legislation will be introduced on Capitol Hill on Monday.
Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., will introduce the Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act on the Senate and House floors on Monday.
The new bill, effectively an amendment to the federal Clean Water Act, will speed up the process of President Obama’s Chesapeake Bay Executive Order.
“This gives state and local governments in the Chesapeake Bay area new grants and new tools to work to restore the Bay’s health,” said Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitsky. “… It puts the force of law behind the executive order.”
The legislation is in part inspired by an Environmental Protection Agency draft report, which was submitted more than a month ago in accordance with Obama’s executive order.
The EPA’s report outlined the need to meet nitrogen and phosphorous pollution reduction in major river basins along the Chesapeake Bay, but under Obama’s order, definitive plans would not be made to solve any of the issues raised by the reports until May 2010.
Monday’s legislation is a necessary amendment to a law that lacked the teeth needed to strongly enforce ambitious rehabilitation efforts, according to Doug Siglin, federal affairs director at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
“One of the problems with the federal Clean Water Act it only has very weak tools to limit non-point source pollution, which is pollution that simply runs off the land,” said Siglin.
Along with industrial waste and sewage, natural pollution picked up by rainwater or snow melt has been a major contributing factor to the Bay’s contamination, Siglin said. Under Cardin’s legislation, actual limitations will be set to limit both.
But the new law would not come into effect until December 2010 at the earliest, as officials await the results of a decadelong pollution study. A team of scientists has been working under court order since 1998 to determine the levels of pollution individual areas of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries can handle by their December 2010 deadline.
