Despite hundreds of millions of dollars put into upgrading sewage plants that spew harmful nutrients into the Chesapeake Bay, progress on the estuary's cleanup continues to be held back by more people moving in, more houses and more parking lots.
Two "report cards" released Thursday show the Chesapeake making small strides toward better water quality, healthier fish stocks and more robust coverage of vital underwater grasses. But they also keyed in on population growth and development as game-changing variables that blunt progress on other fronts.
The EPA-led Chesapeake Bay Program said that cleanup is not happening fast enough, and that the pace needs to quicken if the people of Maryland and Virginia are going to keep up with development's negative impact and ever see a cleaner bay.
The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science gave the Chesapeake an overall "C-" - a slight improvement over last year's D+.
"It's easy to see from this data that much more needs to be done to accelerate the pace of implementation if we are to succeed in cleaning up the bay and its rivers," said Jeff Lape, director of the Chesapeake Bay Program. "It's taken us 400 years to create this challenge. The current incremental approach is not getting the job done."
If development and population growth in the Chesapeake Bay watershed continues as projected, another 9.5 million acres of forests will be threatened by development by 2030, the bay program said. The 64,000-square-mile watershed saw 150,000 people move into it just in 2007, Lape said. Its total population could increase from about 17 million now to more than 20 million in 2030.
Bill Dennison, a vice president of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science, pointed out that in the 1990s paved surfaces expanded by 42 percent in the watershed while population grew only 8 percent. That sprawl of roads, rooftops and parking lots is creating a more efficient method to deliver the Chesapeake's worst enemies - nitrogen phosphorus and sediment - ever more rapidly into its waters.
"At best, we are only holding our own against population growth and development taking place throughout the bay watershed," Dennison said.
In the bay program's wide-ranging report, the control of suburban and urban runoff was one of the few areas where the Chesapeake states are relentlessly losing ground. Most other indicators at least show incremental progress.
Also from the bay program's report, a few key indicators showed that:
* Only 12 percent of the bay and its tributaries met the standard for levels of dissolved oxygen, important for water quality and all marine life, this summer.
* Underwater grasses, important habitat for crabs, increased their cover to 65,000 acres, but that is still only 35 percent of the restoration goal and well short of the 90,000 acres that grasses covered in 2002.
* The blue crab has been getting plenty of attention recently in Virginia, where the state is setting tougher regulations on commercial fishing. The report confirms what state regulators have said: the crab population is struggling, at about 78 percent of the minimum target of 200 million crabs.
Both Virginia and Maryland have made strong commitments in recent years to remove more nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage plants. Dennison said the same emphasis needs to be placed on stemming agricultural and urban runoff.
"The attention has got to be expanded to include these agricultural and urban stormwater sources," he said. "We've been documenting the decline of the bay pretty well now for 25 years. It's time to start turning that around."
Find more online
* The Chesapeake Bay Program's report can be found at www.chesapeakebay.net.
* See the University of Maryland's report card at www.eco-check.org.