With Chesapeake Bay Program In Jeopardy, Lawmakers Shore Up Support

By Briana Thomas, Capital News Service

WASHINGTON, DC — Lawmakers from states around the Chesapeake Bay expressed bipartisan opposition Wednesday to President Donald Trump’s proposal to end federal support for bay cleanup efforts.

“The president’s budget that would zero out the Chesapeake Bay Program is outrageous,” Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat, said at the Capitol Hill meeting with environmental activists. “It’s dead on arrival.”

Trump last month proposed a budget that would eliminate the $73 million federally funded Chesapeake Bay Program.

The Chesapeake Bay Program is a partnership with Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and D.C. started in 1983 to restore the bay’s ecosystem and reduce pollution.

“We know how important the Chesapeake Bay is for the entire region,” said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md. “We are going to fight harder and harder and harder.”

The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the United States serving as a place for recreational water activities, as well as a workplace for the commercial fishing and crabbing industry.

Ruppersberger said the bay generates more than $1 trillion annually and the restoration of oysters, tributaries and streams is a project that needs to be continued.

The bay is also a source of drinking water for 75 percent of the region’s 17 million residents, according to the Choose Clean Water Coalition.

Made up of 225 local, state, and national groups, the Choose Clean Water Coalition — whose members turned out on Capitol Hill this week — has been advocating for a healthy Chesapeake watershed since 2009.

“The Coalition will work to continue to push back on the president’s proposed budget, and secure the essential funding that is necessary to return clean water to the Chesapeake Bay,” coalition spokeswoman Kristin Reilly said in a statement Wednesday.

'Chesapeake Bay is the perfect thing to come together around'

Members of the House and Senate said they were pleased to have bipartisan support for clean water.

“The Chesapeake Bay is the perfect thing to come together around and serve energetically,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, last year’s Democratic vice presidential nominee.

He said everyone has to work together to make sure checks and balances are implemented.

“We have an EPA administrator who doesn’t accept science. If you don’t accept climate science, it’s a fair question to ask if you accept science,” Kaine said, referring to Scott Pruitt, head of the EPA.

Trump signed an executive order last week to shut down the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a program aimed at reducing climate change by cutting carbon emissions from power plants.

“We are faced with a tough budget battle, but an attitude from the EPA that says we can ignore science,” Kaine said.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said cutting investments for the bay clean up will not help the economy.

“Our Chesapeake Bay is an economic engine and the cleaner it is the more it produces economically,” he said.

The bay is a valuable natural resource and if Trump wants more jobs, then he should work to rehabilitate the bay, Wittman said.

The congressman said he was deeply concerned about Trump’s budget plan and wrote a letter to the administration asking to restore resources to the bay.

Wittman wants more money to help revitalize wetlands.

“Our wetlands are the nursery for everything that lives in those ecosystems," he said, adding: "Mother nature is the sponge that absorbs what man puts in it."

Photo by Tom Hausman, Capital News Service.