Experts: Chesapeake Bay program has failed

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - The current program to clean up the polluted Chesapeake Bay has failed, according to top scientists, policy makers and environmentalists.

Experts who gathered in Annapolis on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Chesapeake Bay Agreement say the existing voluntary, collaborative approach to Chesapeake Bay cleanup needs to be abandoned. They want to see it replaced with mandatory, enforceable measures for meeting the nutrient, sediment and toxic chemical reductions.

"The current Bay Program and restoration efforts have been insufficient and are failing to achieve water quality to assure healthy populations of oysters, clams and finfish," says Bill Dennison, a hands-on scientist from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at Horn Point.

"We must act quickly to transition from the voluntary collaborative approach that has failed to a comprehensive regulatory program that addresses the prime sources of nutrient and sediment pollution, or watch the bay die a death of 1,000 cuts. Drastic change is called for."

The agreement to improve the nation's largest estuary was signed in 1983. The agreement called for bay states to meet cleanup goals. High levels of nitrogen, phosporus and sediment are killing bay life. This summer, dead zones kept aquatic life from thriving in parts of the Chesapeake and its tributaries.

"We in the scientific community have seen strong evidence in our research that efforts to reduce nutrients and sediment over the past 25 years are not succeeding," says Walter Boynton of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons.

"Water quality is declining in key Bay rivers, like the Patuxent, and consequently the Bay's living resources also are in decline. Unless a new structure of mandatory limits with enforceable deadlines is adopted that will sharply reduce pollutant loads, the Bay may never recover."

Author and professor Howard Ernst says the bay is dying a slow death.

"The bay is not dying because we do not know what is wrong," Ernst says. "The bay is dying a slow death because the current approach to regional environmental management has left the area with nonbinding agreements instead of enforceable laws, goals instead of pollution limits, an environmental bureaucracy that lacks enforcement powers, and a severely impaired ecosystem that shows no sign of systemic improvement."

Scientists want to see new regulations that reduce individual pollution loads, change development patterns, establish a no net loss of forest and wetlands policy and reduce agricultural pollutants. They also want to see better fishery management and for pollution reductions to be targeted to individual rivers.

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