Bay Journal, Revamping of Bay Program governance expected by summer
When the leaders of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup approved significant revisions last December to the 2014 watershed agreement, they defined what the multi-state and federal partnership will do over the next 15 years. Now, they’re turning their attention to “how.” By July, the Chesapeake Bay Program, which oversees the restoration of America’s largest estuary, is expected to finalize a plan to restructure its governance. Ultimately, the goal of the proposed changes to governance and structure are to advance implementation of the agreement and make the Chesapeake Bay Program more efficient and effective,” said Kelly Offner, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3, in a statement.
Among the key recommendations put forward by an internal panel: fusing the top two committees into a single board, overhauling subject-specific groups to align with the watershed agreement’s changes and strengthening coordination with federal agencies. The restructuring has been in the works for the last few years alongside the effort to update the 2014 agreement. Bay Program officials wanted to have a new agreement in place — the fifth new or thoroughly revised pact in the program’s history — before the end of 2025.
To prepare for the reorganization, the EPA hired the Massachusetts-based Eastern Research Group to evaluate the Bay Program’s structure. The resulting 2024 report highlighted several longstanding criticisms of the effort’s bureaucracy, including that it has become overly complex, opaque, averse to accepting outsiders’ feedback and burdened by a “siloed” structure that impedes collaboration. The report recommended that officials “simplify and streamline” the program’s structure and processes. In December 2024, the Chesapeake Bay Executive Council directed the Principals’ Staff Committee to oversee a top-to-bottom analysis of the partnership’s management structure and implement changes by July 2026.
I like the idea of simplifying the structure, especially it it reduces the numbers of fingers in the pie, but I suspect something less is actually happening in practice.
The proposed structural changes were developed through discussions with the Management Board and the Principals’ Staff Committee, Offner said. To help guide those talks, EPA staff members studied organizational structures and interviewed peers at other regional restoration programs, including the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Puget Sound Partnership and several National Estuary Programs.
Under the new structure, the Executive Council’s membership and roles would remain unchanged. But immediately beneath it in the hierarchy, there would be a big change: The Principals’ Staff Committee and the Management Board would be replaced by a single panel called the Policy Steering Committee, made up of “high-level jurisdictional and federal leaders.”
The steering committee would set priorities for implementation committees, which would in turn preside over goal teams arrayed around the revised agreement’s four priorities: healthy landscapes, clean water, habitats and engaged communities. There would also be groups that provide technical support, and advisory committees would continue to dispense expertise on topics ranging from local government to agriculture. The Chesapeake Executive Council gave the go-ahead to the raft of structural proposals at the same December 2025 meeting in which it approved the revised agreement.
In recent committee meetings, some observers came away worried that only state and federal representatives would be allowed to sit as co-chairs on committees. Historically, leaders of non-governmental organizations have been able to serve in those roles. “If I were trying to accelerate progress and address some of these barriers to success, I would want to talk to people on the ground doing the work, experiencing successes and failures in real time,” said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition. Offner said, though, that “there are no restrictions on non-governmental organizations leadership” chairing committees.
And if I wanted to slow the process, make it less efficient, and make sure more money was wasted on goals that will never be accomplished, I'd invite in a lot more people.
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