The Chesapeake Bay is sick, and the patient hasn't improved since its checkup last year.
That's according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which again this year has given ongoing restoration efforts a barely passing grade on its State of the Bay report card.
The report, released yesterday, gave the bay a health-index rating of 27--the same score it received in 2003. A pristine bay would rate 100 on the index. Zero is the lowest possible score.
The foundation, for the first time this year, also attached a letter grade to the numerical score--a D.
Bay Foundation President William C. Baker said the estuary's troubles stem from governmental inertia, combined with a lack of funding for cleanup.
"Government has failed to meet written commitments and even to enforce existing laws. The [bay] and its tributary rivers, as well as all of the people of the region are paying the price for that inaction," he said.
Each year since 1998 the foundation has averaged 13 indicators to come up with an overall index it says is a comprehensive measure of the bay's health.
Categories include habitat (wetlands, forested buffers, underwater grasses, resource lands); fisheries (crabs, rockfish, oysters, shad); and pollution (toxic substances, water clarity, phosphorus, nitrogen and dissolved oxygen).
The foundation noted that in June 2000, bay states and the federal government signed an agreement to reduce pollution enough to remove the bay from the Environmental Protection Agency's "dirty waters list" by 2010. That would earn a score of about 40 on the index.
"Now almost halfway to that deadline," the report says, "there's been no overall progress since last year and a decline since 2000" when the score was 28.
Scores for four of the 13 indicators--nitrogen, toxics, underwater grasses, rockfish--declined. Four indicators improved--phosphorus, dissolved oxygen, water clarity, shad--and five remained unchanged--forested buffers, wetlands, resource lands, crabs and oysters.
Rockfish, which have made a remarkable comeback in the bay, are one bright spot in the report. Though that index dropped two points from 75 to 73, it still rated an A+. The fish, however, are showing signs of stress, with low body weight and lesions reported.
For several years, nutrient pollution--nitrogen and phosphorus--has been considered the most serious threat to the bay's health.
The chemicals act as fertilizers, which promote algae growth, especially during the summer months. Vast shoals of algae form, sucking oxygen from the water as they decompose and die, creating "dead zones" affecting fish, crabs and oysters.
Lower sections of both the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers were among the areas hit.
Earlier this month, the foundation came up with a proposal to address the nutrient problem. It will lobby the Virginia General Assembly to adopt a statewide user fee of $1 a week for households connected to a sewage treatment plant or septic system. Such a fee would generate about $160 million annually to reduce nitrogen from sewage treatment plants and farm runoff.
That would be similar to a "flush tax" adopted earlier this year by Maryland lawmakers.
The Chesapeake Bay Blue Ribbon Finance Panel in October called on bay jurisdictions and the federal government to make a six-year, $15 billion commitment to reduce bay pollution.
The executive council of the Chesapeake Bay Program meets Dec. 13 at Mount Vernon.
To reach RUSTY DENNEN: 540/374-5431 rdennen@freelancestar.com