Having covered the bay as a reporter for more than three decades, I can assure everyone that this agreement is no different than any of it's predecessors, all of which were nothing more than promises that would never be kept. Over the years, the Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Program has been an abysmal failure, and will continue to be just that. It's nothing more than a political football that keeps shoveling money into the pockets of those individuals that benefit from studying things, but never fixing them. The bay has been studied to death - literally! The first studies I was able to dig up were conducted in the late 1800s, and there have been thousands upon thousands of taxpayer funded studies since then. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to study the bay, and while those making the bucks studying the bay claim they have made great strides in pollution reduction, anyone that has been on the Chesapeake since the 1950s knows the bay is far more polluted than it was then.
The problems are not at all complex and realistically, do not require any more taxpayer funded studies or agreements between states. The fix doesn't require the institution of more taxpayer funded bureaucracies, kingdoms in towering buildings in Annapolis or Baltimore, presentations at MDDNR, acts of congress, etc... Long before CBF, there was the Maryland Rockfish Association that championed the bay water cleanup, an organization that fought to no avail against incredible odds to reduce industrial and municipal pollution. Ironically, their most vociferous opponent was the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. I should know - I had to cover most of the hearings in both Annapolis, Baltimore, Cambridge and Salisbury. At that time, and I suspect things have not changed, Maryland DNR frequently testified on the side of the offending industry or municipality, claiming they rarely if ever exceeded state and federal discharge permit guidelines. It only took 10 minutes of digging in some obscure files to discover that raw sewage spills of less than 10,000 gallons did not have to be reported to DNR or MDE. You would be amazed at the number of of 9,999 gallon spills that take place every year.
Unfortunately, the bay will NEVER be cleaner than it is right now. The reason being is we will never have fewer people living in the bay watershed than we do right now - yep people are the problem. Every newborn child in the watershed area poops into Chesapeake Bay - not directly, at least most of the time, but that poop still ends up in the bay. And that newborn will do this for the next 79 to 82 years. Additionally, he or she will produce offspring that will do the same thing - poop in the bay. Our sewage treatment plants are archaic, overloaded, overflowing, and none of this will change in our lifetime. CBF and similar organizations will continue to hold their hands out begging for more money and making the same claims that they will cleanse the bay's waters and make the pristine. Politicians will make the same brash claims, then increase taxes everyplace they can to garner additional funds. And, as usual, nothing, absolutely nothing, will be accomplished. People will continue to poop in the bay at an exponentially increasing rate.
Now, in order to feed all those newborns, we need to increase our agricultural production. More cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats, ducks, geese, and other farm animals will need to be produced in smaller and smaller spaces, thus concentrating the animal wastes that no longer can be managed. We currently mandate manure barns for large scale chicken farms on Maryland's eastern shore, and at the same time, politicians turned down a proposal from a corporation to construct an electrical power plant that would incinerate the chicken manure during the production of electricity and steam. WHAT?
The question that comes to mind is why did anyone in their right mind think that dumping treated and raw sewage, and a host of industrial wastes into a body of water where we harvest a food-source think that it was a good idea? At DNR, EPA, MDE and many other similar agencies their mottos have always been "The solution to pollution is dilution." At least that's the ways it seems, and for the most part has been proven true.
Now, some on this forum may think I'm being cynical. However, after spending nearly 3/4s of a century plying and fishing the bay's waters, I think I'm just being realistic. I've heard and read every promise made by every politician and scientist over the years and watched the bay rapidly go downhill every single year. I've witnessed, firsthand, the bay's fisheries being raped by commercial interest. I, like all citizens of watershed areas, have been taxed to death by those that have created a cottage industry by studying Chesapeake Bay, an industry that has stolen billions of dollars from hard-working people throughout the region and shoveled it into their pockets.
Yes, I'm cynical, pissed, tired of battling politicians and left wingers, and in the next few weeks, you'll watch a lot more dollars being flushed down the toilet for absolutely no reason. That meeting in Annapolis will be attended by all the do gooders from CBF, DNR, state and federal agencies, they'll applaud the goals they claim to have reached, they'll pat each other on their backs and tell each other what a wonderful job they're doing. And when you put your boat back into this cesspool called Chesapeake Bay next spring, take a good look at the water. Do you for one minute think it looks better than it did in 1960? Think about it.
Gary