Pennsylvania Promises to Clean Up It's Bay Act

The Bay Journal, PA contends its new cleanup plan will meet Bay goals

Pennsylvania, long criticized for its lack of Chesapeake Bay cleanup progress, submitted an updated strategy to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Dec. 31 that state officials say will meet its 2025 pollution reduction goals.

At issue is how to ramp up efforts in Pennsylvania, which sends the most water-fouling nutrients to the Chesapeake of any state in the Bay watershed. The EPA said it will decide by the end of February whether the plan is realistic.

Adam Ortiz, administrator of the agency’s mid-Atlantic region, said that if the EPA does not find the state’s watershed implementation plan convincing, the agency could take a variety of actions to force the state to do more — some of which could have costly ramifications.

“We have regulatory powers,” Ortiz said. “We will not hesitate to use those backstop measures if the amended WIP is insufficient.”

During a farm visit to discuss Pennsylvania’s new plan, Karl Brown, executive secretary of the State Conservation Commission, acknowledged “there’s no question that Pennsylvania, and particularly the ag sector, has to accelerate our efforts.”

But, he said, the state now has “unprecedented momentum” toward meeting its Bay goals. He noted that Pennsylvania had the largest nutrient reduction of any state in the watershed in 2020, the year for which the most recent data is available, and it has recently steered more money toward Bay efforts.
. . .
Now, Pennsylvania officials say their amended plan will fully meet its Bay obligations. It includes steps to secure greater nutrient reductions, but it closes much of the gap by contending that the state-federal Bay Program has undercounted nitrogen reductions from the state by 8.6 million pounds. Mainly, those are agricultural practices installed years ago that the Bay Program says have exceeded their expected lifespan and are no longer effective.

“Thousands of functioning best management practices in Pennsylvania, many of them having been federally cost-shared with taxpayer dollars, are now considered expired,” said Jill Whitcomb, director of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bay office. But, she said, data collected by Pennsylvania and other states shows that many of those “continue to function far beyond their credit duration.”

Now there's a twist I was unaware of. The "best management practices" that were adopted earlier have expired? The trees planted by the stream sides have stopped protecting the streams? The cows now fly over the fences to keep cows out of the streams? 

Do the sewer upgrades that municipalities quit working and expire?

Monitoring data from the U.S. Geological Survey does show significant nutrient improvements in the Susquehanna River, which drains most of Pennsylvania’s portion of the Bay watershed. Nutrient trends are also improving in Conestoga Creek, which flows through Lancaster County — the most agriculture-intensive county in the Bay watershed.

Remember, it's probably not in the interest of the Bay community to actually achieve a clean up; what would happen to all the governmental, academic and NGO jobs that depend on the ongoing work?