Satellite picture of Chesapeake Bay (center) and Delaware Bay (upper right) - and Atlantic coast of the central-eastern United States.
Maryland's main natural resource is The Chesapeake Bay. About 200 miles long, the water increases in salinity as it goes from the Susquehanna River to the Atlantic Ocean. Back in colonial times, there were enough bivalves to filter the total volume of water in about a week and oyster reefs were so large they often caused shipping problems. The blue crab and rockfish, a regional name for striped bass, are other popular fisheries in the bay.
Over the years, due to overharvesting, pollution, daming waterways and lack of planning, oysters are now at 1% of their historical population levels, rockfish had a near brush with extinction, and blue crabs populations can vary greatly year to year. There is also a sizeable deadzone that crops up year after year due to pollution runoff, further hindering recovery efforts.
Aside from putting into place catch limits, Maryland has been trying to put into place pollution controls. In 2004, Gov. Ehrlich (R) lobbied for and got the "Bay Restoration Fund" derisively known as the "Flush Tax" to upgrade the state's 67 wastewater treatment plants, 35 have been upgraded with others in various stages of completion. Once complete, the upgrades are expected to reduce ~7.5 million pounds of nitrogen/year and ~0.22 million pounds of phosphorus/year below the year 2000 levels.
So what does this have to do with the Farm Bureau and Attorney Generals from 21 other states? They are fearful of the next steps that Maryland and the EPA are undertaking to rehabilitate The Chesapeake Bay.
“The issue is whether EPA can reach beyond the plain language of the Clean Water Act and micromanage how states meet federal water-quality standards,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said. “We think the clear answer is ‘no,’ and we would prefer to get that answer while the question surrounds land use in the Chesapeake Bay instead of waiting for EPA to do the same thing along the Mississippi River basin.”
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The case in which Kansas filed its amicus brief this week is American Farm Bureau Federation, et al., v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Case No. 13-4079. Kansas is supporting the plaintiff, American Farm Bureau Federation.
States joining the Kansas-led brief are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The programs that have conservatives and the American Farm Bureau in a tizzy for The Chesapeake Bay are:
1) An interstate compact for The Chesapeake Bay - this agreement, started in 1983, has states in The Chesapeake Bay's watershed sets goals and coordination to reduce pollution. The EPA, thanks to an executive order, is now heading and controlling the implementation of the program.
2) A Stormwater Management Fee, aka "Rain Tax" for Maryland's 10 largest jurisdictions to raise money to fund restoration efforts and pollution controls. This state law, along with other state and EPA efforts like the flush tax, is part of that "land use" Schmidt was referring to.
What concerns Agribusiness and the other suing states is if restoration efforts are successful, they can be implemented on the nation's largest watershed, The Mississippi River's watershed.
The Mississippi River watershed is the fourth largest in the world, extending from the Allegheny Mountains in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. The watershed includes all or parts of 31 states and 2 Canadian Provinces. The watershed measures approximately 1.2 million square miles, covering about 40% of the lower 48 states.
Currently, the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone, off the coast of Louisiana and Texas, is the largest in the United States. The Mississippi River dumps the same high-nutrient runoff that is carried into The Chesapeake Bay, from untreated sewage to agricultural runoff. It wouldn't be too difficult to scale up the program currently underway to those in the Mississippi's. And that is exactly what Kansas AG is afraid of:
In a press release about his amicus (or "friend of the court") brief, Schmidt explained that he’s afraid that EPA will “do the same thing along the Mississippi River basin.” In other words, he is afraid the federally-mandated cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay will become a model for waterways across the nation. What they fear is that states will be held accountable for controlling the total amount of runoff pollution from farms and urban areas that they allow into their own streams and rivers.
Read on to learn how the issue came to be in Maryland and the current stakes.
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