Experts Slam Chesapeake Bay Draft Plan Over Lack of Pollution Targets and Accountability – Inside Climate News

The newest draft of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement lacks meaningful pollution reduction targets and allows states to evade legal accountability, according to concerned environmental advocates and experts who have reviewed the document. 

Released for public comment on July 1, the current draft is intended to chart the future course of bay restoration efforts beyond 2025. But the proposal obscures enforcement responsibilities under the Clean Water Act, experts say, and dilutes the legal clarity of the 2010 Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), the so-called nutrient diet for a healthy bay, and shifts toward more voluntary, advisory language.

The proposed agreement, open for public comment through September 1, reduces the structure of the 2014 version of the agreement from 10 goals and 31 outcomes to 4 goals and 21 outcomes, on the pretext that doing so would streamline efforts. 

Critical metrics are missing throughout the document. Pollution targets for nitrogen and phosphorus are unspecified, key conservation outcomes are left as placeholders (“XX%”) and multiple deadlines are extended to 2030, 2035, or 2040 without explanation or justification. The section outlining “Management Strategies,” crucial for overseeing progress, replaces prior biennial review cycles with an undefined “X-year” periods. 

Several restoration targets in the new draft are significantly scaled back from earlier agreements. For instance, the wetlands goal drops from 85,000 acres restored by 2025 to just 3,000 acres by 2035, while the submerged aquatic vegetation target is reduced from 130,000 acres by 2025 to 95,000 acres by 2035. Meanwhile, all land protection goals—including for forests, agricultural land and tribal homelands—are left blank, marked with placeholders for public input.

Anna Killius, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, explained that placeholders were purposely included in the draft. “Blanks or Xs were intentionally left for specific targets and update intervals where more information from our subject matter experts and the public would be particularly helpful in guiding us to a final number,” she said.

The Chesapeake Bay Agreement is a voluntary pact between seven jurisdictions including Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is federal signatory to the agreement. Goals are proposed and finalized collectively by the Chesapeake Bay Program Partnership, which includes state and federal agencies, academic institutions and local stakeholders. 

“The Principals’ Staff Committee intends to finalize these numbers before delivering the revised Watershed Agreement to the Chesapeake Executive Council by the end of the year,” Killius said, referring to the governing body, made up of governors, the EPA administrator and the mayor of D.C., that formally approves the agreement.

Debate over the new document comes as the health of the bay continues to decline. As Inside Climate News previously reported, the 2025 Chesapeake Bay report card showed a drop in the overall health score from a C+ to a C, reflecting worsening conditions in water clarity, aquatic vegetation and dissolved oxygen. 

The scorecard’s authors pointed to a continuing failure to curb nutrient runoff—especially nitrogen—as a primary factor contributing to chronic “dead zones” in the bay’s deeper waters. Despite some progress in point-source reductions from wastewater treatment plants, agriculture and urban runoff from nonpoint pollution sources remain largely unaddressed.

Since the first agreement was signed in 1983, four successive iterations added more goals and signatories, which experts said reflected a growing awareness of the bay’s ecological decline and the need for binding commitments, accountability and regional cooperation. In that spirit, the 2000 and 2014 agreements set firmer targets, including the Bay TMDL, a legally binding pollution diet intended to hold states accountable through 2025. 

Originally set in 2010, the 2025 TMDL targets, reaffirmed in the 2014 agreement, have largely been missed. 

As of 2023, states had achieved only 59 percent of their nitrogen reduction targets and about 67 percent of their phosphorus goals. Some experts blamed these shortfalls in part on the EPA’s reluctance to penalize jurisdictions that failed to rein in pollution runoff, most notably Pennsylvania. 

Instead of enforcing the TMDL’s legal obligations, the Chesapeake Bay Program leaned on voluntary strategies, which critics said undermined the integrity of the cleanup framework.

Against that backdrop, critics argue that the current proposal is more of a bureaucratic attempt to reset expectations without confronting the structural failures of past decades. 

“It’s hard to ‘consult’ on a blank target, especially when that target is hazy or absent,” said Jon Mueller, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “Instead of picking up the baton and creating a document that builds upon prior agreements, the states have abandoned their role as protectors of our shared resources.”

Mueller was especially critical of what he described as the EPA’s failure to lead. “In my opinion, this is due to EPA’s lack of will to seize the reins,” he said. “Given the current federal administration, that is not surprising. What is shocking is that the states whose water quality is horribly impaired—and will continue to be impaired—have failed to act.”

Evan Isaacson, senior attorney of the Chesapeake Legal Alliance agreed with Mueller, saying the revised timelines in the draft would not align with legal standards. 

“Unlike the Bay Agreement, which is voluntary and establishes ‘goals’, the Bay TMDL is not voluntary. It is a regulatory instrument,” he said. “So, whatever this agreement establishes for a new timeline would be incompatible with existing legal obligations.”

Keisha Sedlacek, senior policy director at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, called the current draft “incomplete” and warned that its omissions were consequential. “The current version falls short in charting the course to clean water, healthy habitats and engaged communities,” she said. “While the key goals and outcomes are included, the draft agreement lacks accountability and important details.”

Sedlacek emphasized that the agreement must “affirm commitments to the pollution reductions the federal government and states are legally required to meet under the Clean Water Act. If pollution reduction commitments are abandoned, we must explore all options—including litigation.”

The Maryland League of Conservation Voters echoed those concerns. “This adjustment appears to be a retreat from accountability, most likely due to the challenge of keeping the partnership together with states at varying levels of political commitment,” said policy advocate Marisa Olszewski.

She added that the undefined “X-year” Management Strategy cycle was especially problematic. “If we truly believe that ongoing monitoring and adjustments based on observed outcomes is the best path forward, then the timeline for that review should be clearly defined,” she said.

In a written statement, EPA’s region 3 office said that while the Bay Agreement is a voluntary document, “revisions to the Chesapeake Bay Agreement do not and cannot change EPA’s oversight role and backstop authorities regarding the Chesapeake Bay TMDL.”

Leila Duman, the Chesapeake & Coastal Bays restoration officer at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, acknowledged concerns over reduced restoration targets but defended the revisions. “The 2014 target wasn’t realistic based on the lands and resources available for wetland restoration. The new restoration target is actually more aggressive than the average implementation progress we’ve been making during the previous decade. With these new targets, we’re saying we can do better than we did from 2014 to 2024.”

The proposed agreement will head to the Chesapeake Executive Council for final approval later this year. But some who watch the bay carefully worry that the draft represents too much of a retreat. 

“Without the TMDL as its north star for water quality improvements,” said Mueller, “the Bay Agreement is simply a message in a bottle set adrift to float aimlessly.” 

Isaacson echoed the sentiment, with an eye on the future. “How many generations are going to go by,” he asked, “before we finally accomplish what the scientists say we need to do to give the bay ecosystem a chance?”