For nearly two decades, State and federal officials concealed the fact that the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program was failing, according to a stunning article in today’s Washington Post. The officials were motivated by a desire to preserve the funding. From the article:
…[T]hey tried to make the cleanup effort look less hopeless than it was.
That picture emerges from internal documents and from interviews with current and former officials involved in the cleanup, including two who served as director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, the closest thing to a “bay czar” that the decentralized effort has.
William Matuszeski, who headed the program from 1991 to 2001, described how the program repeatedly released data that exaggerated its success, hoping to influence Congress. His successor, Rebecca W. Hanmer, said she was instructed by regional leaders in 2002 not to acknowledge that the effort would fall short of its 2010 goals.
“To protect appropriations you were getting, you had to show progress,” Matuszeski said. “So I think we had to overstate our progress.”
The tragedy of the coverup is that it has allowed ineffective strategies to remain in place for years. Now, 25 years and $6 billion later, the Bay is in just as bad a shape as when the effort started. Here’s a chart of the percentage of the bay that is considered “dead” due to insufficient oxygen:
The good news is that in February 2007 Gov. O’Malley created a program called BayStat, which makes the health of the Chesapeake Bay much more transparent.
But it’s clear now that real progress will not be made without changing the relationship between the government and entrenched special interests, particularly the development and agricultural lobbies.
Much more on that soon.
