Chesapeake Bay is healthier than before, but still gets C- in new report

The Chesapeake Bay is healthier today by nearly every measure, with upticks in blue crabs and striped bass, record levels of underwater grasses and the clearest water in years.

That’s the upshot of a two-year “2016 State of the Bay” report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation about the vast estuary that Capt. John Smith and his fellow colonists encountered when they reached Virginia.

Much of the improvement is attributed to below-average rainfall, which led to less nitrogen and phosphorus washing into the bay off Virginia and Maryland. But foundation president Will Baker says it also shows that six years of a regional partnership to restore the estuary are paying off.

“The news is very good,” Baker said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “Water clarity is better than many of us who’ve been looking at this system for decades have ever seen. It’s setting records in some parts of the bay, in its rivers.... Lush underwater grass beds are at record levels in some parts of the bay. And native oysters are making a comeback after a near commercial extinction.”

But the news isn’t all rosy.

Efforts to plant forested buffers to reduce erosion lost ground for the first time over the last two years, while efforts to reduce toxins, restore wetlands and protect forests and other resource lands stalled overall.

All told, bay cleanup efforts earned a C- in the foundation’s health index — the highest it’s been since the group began issuing its reports in 1998.

“The bay is nowhere near saved,” Baker said. “We’ve got a long way left to go. [And] the recovery is fragile. Any reduction in effort now and we will see the gains reversed and the decline begin again.”

Since 2010, Virginia and five other states that make up the 64,000-square-mile watershed have been under a federal “pollution diet” to restore the bay by 2025.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, citing years of failure by bay states to reduce pollutants and sediment, imposed total maximum daily loads for nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment, then left it up to the states to come up with ways to meet those reductions.

2017 is considered a key midpoint benchmark for the clean water blueprint. States agreed to have 60% of antipollution measures in place by the end of this year in order to eventually restore the bay.

Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania make up 85% of the watershed, while portions of New York, Delaware, West Virginia and the District of Columbia make up the rest.

Virginia and Maryland are largely on track to meet their 2017 benchmarks, Baker said, probably because they’re on the bay’s mainstem and public and political sentiment to fund cleanup is stronger.

But, farther up the watershed, Pennsylvania has lagged in its benchmarks for years, achieving only a small fraction of its load reductions, especially from agricultural lands. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, that failure has triggered EPA “backstop” actions that could affect federal enforcement, grants, permits and other measures in the state.

But 2017 could bring new challenges for cleanup efforts going forward.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA is Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit that challenged the EPA’s authority to impose total maximum daily loads for the Chesapeake Bay.

And last year U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) introduced an amendment to stop the EPA from imposing backstops on states that don’t meet their total maximum daily loads.

Goodlatte has said his intention wasn’t to stop the EPA from working with states to restore the bay or to undermine cleanup efforts, but to prevent the federal agency from taking over a state’s cleanup plan or take retaliatory action if a state doesn’t meet federal mandates. His measure passed the House but wasn’t included in the continuing resolution that is funding the federal government through March.

For its biennial report, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation assesses bay health using 13 indicators grouped into three broad categories: pollution, habitat and fisheries.

Each indicator is scored from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better — 100 represents the theoretical pristine condition that greeted Capt. Smith and his fellow colonists when they arrived in the early 1600s and settled along the James River.

With 18 million people living in the watershed today, achieving that perfect score again is unrealistic, Baker said. A fully restored bay today would mean a score of 70. The goal for 2025 is to reach 40.

The bay’s overall average score in the 2016 report is 34, or 2 points higher than the grade for 2014, which was a D+.

Dietrich writes for the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.