A move in Congress to slash funding for Chesapeake Bay clean-up efforts has received the support of the House of Representatives, although local leaders have gone on record opposing the cut.

Two of the region’s local representatives—Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Montross) and Del. Harvey B. Morgan (R-Middlesex)—have sent a strong message that the plan to eliminate all federal funding to "develop, promulgate, evaluate, implement (and) provide oversight to" cleanup efforts under the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) is a bad idea.

Wittman was the only Virginia Republican to vote against the amendment to the budget bill, which is now in negotiations in the U.S. Senate. The vote on the budget amendment was 230-195, largely along party lines. Fifteen Republicans voted against the bill, while eight Democrats voted for it.

Morgan wrote a letter last week to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Roanoke), who sponsored the budget amendment, asking him to reconsider his position. Morgan said that studies show that every dollar spent on implementing agriculture best management practices produces $1.56 in new economic activity for the locality.

He wrote of the loss of jobs in the commercial fishing industry and "cultural and economic devastation that comes with the loss of a way of life because our commitment to restore the Chesapeake Bay has not been fulfilled." He urged Goodlatte to "ensure that adequate technical and cost-share funding be made available to support Virginia’s farmers and local governments as we endeavor to restore the Chesapeake Bay watershed."

Goodlatte wasn’t moved by the plea, however. In a statement on his website, Goodlatte called the limits on nitrogen and phosphorus in the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines for bay cleanup "overly aggressive, one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington, D.C. that overturn state rules and give more power to federal bureaucrats."

He charged that there had been no cost-benefit analysis on the measures and that the nutrient limits in the bill are arbitrary. In spite of the fact that the EPA and Virginia recently came to an agreement after negotiating details of the mandates, Goodlatte called the EPA’s actions "a regulatory power grab" and said that "each individual state, and the localities in each state, know better how to manage a state’s water quality goals than the bureaucrats at the EPA."

But Morgan disagreed with that point of view. He said that the watershed implementation plan adopted by Virginia last November is cost-effective, provides a "safe haven" for farmers who voluntarily implement the resource management plans outlined, and includes a tax credit program for agricultural best management practices, but that it "cannot fully be implemented without considerable technical and financial support from the federal government."

EPA’s actions were in response to the failure of an agreement among the states of the Chesapeake Bay watershed to substantially clean the bay by 2010.

Wittman said in an interview Tuesday that he had spent the time that he’s been in Congress "trying to bring folks together to put together the best way to implement water quality improvements" and that this amendment "ran contrary to that."

Taking away money to fund the improvements doesn’t take away Virginia’s mandate to put them into practice, said Wittman.

"If you’re going to take away dollars to do that, it takes money from state and local governments," he said. "Purely taking away dollars doesn’t clean up the bay or get us to public policy that considers the impact on localities and the agricultural community."

Wittman said that other representatives have legitimate concerns that the EPA will overreach and not be cognizant of cost factors, but that it’s a matter of working toward common ground with the EPA and encouraging the regulatory agency to come up with reasonable and thoughtful policies. He mentioned a bill he sponsored last year that would coordinate spending on the Chesapeake Bay across all agencies and bring financial accountability to cleanup efforts.

Pointing out that Virginia had originally put through a plan that the EPA hadn’t accepted, Wittman said the two entities had worked toward an agreement that both had eventually signed off on. He, too, had an opinion counter to Goodlatte’s regarding the ability of the states to clean up the bay.

"Efforts have been made for years to clean up the bay," Witt-
man said, "but I don’t think anybody out there is satisfied with where we are."

Although he voted against Goodlatte’s amendment, Wittman eventually voted for the bill as a whole because it had cuts to federal spending, and he said it was necessary in order to bring spending down to more responsible levels. The final vote on the bill was 335 to 91, with 231 out of 237 Republicans and 104 out of 189 Democrats supporting it.

President William C. Baker of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation accused Goodlatte of "seeking to torpedo the bay restoration plan before the ink is scarcely dry."

"The cleanup plan, finalized just weeks ago, is the result of years of intense work, community outreach, and consensus agreement among scientists, policymakers, and leaders in six states," said Baker. "It follows decades of widely acknowledged failure to restore a national treasure that multiple presidents, governors and members of Congress have pledged to restore and that millions of voters have consistently said they support."

Baker said that the plan needs a fully supportive and involved federal partner in order to succeed.

"As history has shown, the bay states cannot do it alone," said Baker. "The Bay TMDL may well represent the bay’s best and last chance for restoration." 

The budget bill is now under consideration in the U.S. Senate.