The Ball Is Back in EPA's Court Following Release of Final Bay Restoration Plans
Last week, the six Chesapeake Bay states and the District of Columbia posted their final plans to meet the 2025 pollution reduction targets under the Bay cleanup effort known as the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load ("Bay TMDL" for short). These final Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) were, by and large, little different from the draft ones released this spring, at least for the big three Bay jurisdictions (Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) that are responsible for roughly 90 percent of the nutrient pollution in the Bay.
When the draft Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) for Pennsylvania was released in April, many were outraged that it contained a fatal flaw. The WIP failed to pass the most basic test, which is to propose actions that would actually provide the pollution reductions needed to meet the state's 2025 final Bay TMDL target. That fatal flaw still remains, although the final WIP would close the gap slightly. Without a plan in place to fully reduce pollution to the level needed to deliver clean water throughout the Susquehanna River watershed and the Chesapeake Bay, there really is not much else to say about Pennsylvania's final WIP other than that EPA, advocates, and concerned citizens must …
Chesapeake Bay and clean water advocates in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic region celebrated a significant legal win last week as Talen Energy, owner of the notorious Brunner Island coal-fired power plant, agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). The settlement is big news first and foremost because it will result in the closure and excavation of a massive coal ash disposal pond and the treatment of a number of other ponds, thus eliminating a significant source of pollution contaminating water supplies for residents in Central Pennsylvania. The successful settlement and the widespread press coverage that followed also serve as a pointed reminder of the importance of citizen enforcement of our environmental laws.
Under the settlement, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will collect a $1 million penalty from Talen Energy. That's particularly notable because DEP was not an original plaintiff in this …
On June 21, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its evaluation of the third and final round of state Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) under the Chesapeake Bay restoration framework known as the "Bay TMDL" (Total Maximum Daily Load). EPA's evaluation of the seven Bay jurisdictions broke no new ground regarding the quality or contents of the states' plans, but instead reiterated many of the same findings and concerns expressed by advocates, including the ones I expressed with my colleague David Flores. So what, if anything, is EPA going to do about the many shortcomings in the state WIPs?
From the looks of it, not nearly enough. The first indication that EPA's evaluation was not going to be a satisfactory response to the problematic WIPs was buried in a footnote. In the second footnote on the first page of each of the WIP evaluations, EPA says that it …
In April, states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed published drafts of the latest iteration of plans to reduce pollution and protect their rivers and streams. New analyses from the Center for Progressive Reform show that the plans fall far short of what is needed to restore the health and ecological integrity of the Chesapeake Bay.
The draft plans, known as Phase III watershed implementation plans (WIPs), were developed as part of the Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) framework that includes all the states in the Chesapeake watershed. CPR Policy Analysts David Flores and Evan Isaacson focused on three states – Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia – that are responsible for nearly 90 percent of nitrogen pollution to the Chesapeake and represent more than 90 percent of the remaining pollution reductions needed to reach the final 2025 pollution reduction target.
Isaacson examined and evaluated the draft WIPs with several criteria …
The Chesapeake Bay Program has just compiled its annual data assessing progress toward the watershed-wide pollution reduction target under the Bay restoration framework known as the "Bay TMDL." The bottom line is that recent gains in Bay health could soon be eclipsed by the lagging pace of pollution reductions, with the likely result that the region will fall well short of the Bay TMDL 2025 target date to achieve the reductions needed to restore the Bay's health.
One of the primary causes of this slow pace of progress is that the agencies primarily responsible for Bay restoration simply aren't doing their jobs the way they used to. For example, the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) recently released its annual report showing the level of activity enforcing environmental laws. In 2018, the agency reported just 25 actions to enforce the federal Clean Water Act's core regulatory …
It's that point in the year when we take a step back and reflect on the past 12 months. This was a big year for those concerned about restoring the Chesapeake Bay, with plenty of feel-good stories about various species and ecosystems rebounding more quickly than expected. There were also more than a few headlines about record-setting rainfalls washing trash down the rivers, over dams, and coating the Bay's shores. But I am going to look beneath the headlines at what is driving – or hindering – our progress in restoring the Bay and where things stand now that we're just past the halfway mark in the current Bay cleanup framework. So, in no particular order, here are the top 10 stories and issues I've been watching this year, which I'll expand upon in a series of posts over the next few weeks.
10) States Began to Craft Their …
This op-ed originally ran in the Bay Journal. Reprinted with permission.
Recent extreme weather — Hurricanes Harvey and Florence — caused widespread toxic contamination of floodwaters after low-lying chemical plants, coal ash storage facilities and hog waste lagoons were inundated.
Such storm-driven chemical disasters demonstrate that state water pollution permitting programs are overdue for reforms that account for stronger and more intense hurricanes and heavy rainfall events, sea level rise and extreme heat.
As the District of Columbia and the states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed prepare their final watershed implementation plans for cleaning up the Bay, two important lessons should be clear from the recent disasters: First, climate change will greatly complicate Bay cleanup efforts and must therefore be factored into planning. Second, the state regulation of pollution sources can and should be a critical component of the plan.
The potential pollution implications of climate change are many …
This is an update to an earlier post explaining why the release of EPA’s TMDL expectations is important. These posts are part of an ongoing series on the midpoint assessment and long-term goals of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort.
This week, EPA’s Mid-Atlantic regional office released its final expectations for how states and their federal partners are to implement the third and final phase of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup process, which runs from 2018 to 2025. The good news is that the document is generally consistent with previous drafts and the expectations of Bay advocates.
In my previous post, included below, I emphasized that the document would be a bellwether signaling the extent to which EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt or other Trump administration officials are overtly or publicly interfering with the future of the Bay cleanup process known as the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. At least …
Yesterday in this space, I took a look at the progress that three Chesapeake Bay watershed states – New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia – have made in implementing their Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs), on their way – perhaps – to meeting the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) pollution reduction targets for 2025. In this post, I'll take a look at Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.
Delaware
The Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) is leading the WIP implementation effort in the state. The department has convened a Chesapeake Bay Interagency Workgroup made up of representatives from each DNREC Division, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, Office of State Planning Coordination, County Conservation Districts, and other stakeholders. The workgroup will focus on two selected sectors: agriculture and developed. They are responsible for recommending and reviewing sub-allocating methodologies to the various nonpoint sources within the basins, assessing …
The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort is arguably one of the largest conservation endeavors ever undertaken. The Bay watershed is made up of 150 major rivers and streams and contains 100,000 smaller tributaries spread across Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. It supplies drinking water for more than 17 million residents and is one of the most important economic drivers on the East Coast of the United States.
The Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), enacted in 2010 by the Environmental Protect Agency (EPA) in collaboration with the Chesapeake Bay states, is a framework for allocating and eliminating excessive loads of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment polluting the watershed. It was designed to ensure that pollution control measures would reduce persistent dead zones in the Bay and its tidal tributaries by 2025. As part of the TMDL, the states and …
