Saving the Bay
Delegate Kenneth R. "Ken" Plum
 
The beautiful vistas of the Chesapeake Bay belie the fact that the Bay is very sick.  Captain John Smith's exploration of the Bay in the early seventeenth century found oyster shells as big as a man's boot track and an estuary teeming with fish and seafood.  After centuries of sewage dumping, industrial and agricultural runoff, and neglect, the Bay is struggling to survive.  Every summer brings more reports of "dead zones" in the Bay where no life is present.
 
Former Delegate and Secretary of Natural Resources Tayloe Murphy wrote recently that the number of watermen who made their livelihood harvesting Chesapeake Bay seafood declined from 14,000 to 1,500 between 1993 and 2009 and that the loss of the Bay's native oyster population has cost the economies of Virginia and Maryland more than $4 billion.  But the news could have been worse.  Efforts over the past couple of decades to upgrade sewage treatment plants, introduce agricultural best management practices, and reduce runoff have slowed the decline.
 
The federal courts and the federal government with the pending Chesapeake Clean Water Act and an Executive Order from President Obama are leading a renewed effort to arrest the decline and to restore the Bay.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released draft requirements for pollution control on the six states and the District of Columbia that make up the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Their proposed "pollution diet" of Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) of pollution limits is under discussion with the affected states and D.C.  These limits would have to be met by 2025 with 60 percent compliance by 2017.
 
Virginia's response to the EPA's draft requirements has been disappointing to date.  As the state with perhaps the most to gain from a healthy Bay, Virginia's draft Watershed Implementation Plan spends too much time debating the "science" of establishing TMDLs and too little acknowledgement of the clearly visible problem that needs to be solved.  There is too much discussion of schemes to trade pollution credits and too little effort at reducing pollution.  The Virginia Plan nods in the direction of protecting large developers and agricultural interests at the expense of greater advantages to society as a whole.  The Bay is sick; Virginia needs to get serious about saving the patient.