Bay cleanup could take even longer | Maryland Gazette (HometownGlenBurnie.com)

Key bay cleanup officials arranged to meet in Annapolis Wednesday to discuss the process for creating bay-wide pollution limits by 2011, which would be overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation insists there's no need to take that long to get the pollution budget finalized.

"Everyone agrees we need to accelerate implementation of pollution reduction goals," said Roy Hoagland, vice president of CBF's advocacy arm.

Taking until 2011 to create the next cleanup plan doesn't jibe with CBF's idea of acceleration, he said.

"I can't tell you whether it would be a year, six months - but three-plus years is ludicrous," Mr. Hoagland said.

The pollution budget will evaluate how much pollution the bay can safely handle. Those pollution limits would be assigned to the different states and the various sources of pollution.

A presentation developed for this week's meeting showed a timeline that starts now, has a draft of the pollution budget ready in mid-2010 with the final pollution budget completed in mid-2011.

The 2011 date is a result of the settlement of a lawsuit from the late 1990s over bay cleanup. That settlement gave the bay-area states until 2010 to work cooperatively get the bay off the list of the nation's "dirty waters."

If that doesn't happen - and everyone agrees it won't - then the EPA has to step in and create the baywide pollution budget by 2011.

The Chesapeake Bay and its rivers are plagued by excess amounts of nutrients and sediment that make much of the water uninhabitable for fish, crabs, shellfish and underwater grasses.

The nutrients - which reach the bay from farms, lawns, sewage plants and air pollution - spur the growth of algae. When the algae decompose, they suck life-sustaining oxygen from the water, leading to the bay's infamous summertime "dead zones."

Jeff Lape, director of the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program and an EPA employee, defended the timetable.

"There are important process steps. The states have to make determinations about impaired waters. After that, EPA makes a determination about the need to do a TMDL," he said. "The prevailing opinion is the TMDL his highly likely. And then there's the technical development, the public notice, public engagement ... That process takes some time."

The TMDL is the "total maximum daily load," the technical term for how much pollution the bay can handle.

Mr. Hoagland and the bay foundation say enough is known about the bay's problems and how to solve them that it shouldn't take that long to create the baywide pollution budget.

"It is time - past time - for the EPA to exert its role as the enforcer and protector of the nation's waters under the Clean Water Act to develop a strong, enforceable, Bay-wide TMDL," Mr. Hoagland wrote in a letter to the EPA. "And it should do so, now, given the existing admission of the failure of the current program."