From Choose Clean Water Coalition:
The President has released his budget for Fiscal Year 2018, which recommends that the $73 million budget for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program be eliminated and shutdown.This would stop the clean up of Chesapeke Bay in its tracks and undo the tremendous progress we have made to date.
The budget also includes massive spending cuts for programs related to clean air and water, environmental justice, climate change, and other vital programs that protect our environment.
The Chesapeake Bay watershed is made up of a network of hundreds of thousands of rivers and streams, and are important sources of recreation, food, and drinking water for millions of people. Tens of thousands of members of the tourism and fishing industry depend on the Bay to provide for their families, with the Bay’s economic worth estimated at over $1 trillion. In addition, over 13 million people from six different states and the District of Columbia rely on the Bay’s rivers and streams to provide the water that they drink. The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort is not only about saving an iconic estuary, it is about protecting the water that residents depend on for life.
“The President’s proposed budget would mean an end to a coordinated Chesapeake Bay restoration effort,” said Hilary Harp Falk, Mid-Atlantic regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and co-chair of the Choose Clean Water Coalition. “With no federal funding for the Chesapeake, projects that are reducing flooding, improving communities, bringing back fish and wildlife, and cleaning drinking water will come to a halt.”
Bay Program funding supports on the ground restoration efforts that are improving communities and protecting local waterways around the watershed. The 226 organizations that make up the Choose Clean Water Coalition are just some of the organizations responsible for implementing these restoration projects, and with no funding, grant programs that help sustain and support critical work would disappear, leaving many organizations with little to no support to implement projects.
“Support from the Bay Program is essential to continuing to reduce pollution in our local rivers and streams.” said Chante Coleman, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition. “With such a drastic cut in funding, some of the most basic needs that people and wildlife depend on, like clean drinking water, will be threatened.”
The Bay Program is a classic example of “cooperative federalism”, where federal agencies and states work collaboratively, with EPA providing critical resources and expertise to the states, who are ultimately responsible for cleaning their own waters. Just a few weeks ago, 17 members of the House, both Democrat and Republican, sent a letter to the President Trump requesting full funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program. The Coalition will work with Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to continue to push back on this proposed budget, and secure the essential funding that is necessary to return clean water to the Chesapeake Bay.
The Choose Clean Water Coalition, an organization that harnesses the collective power of more than 226 local, state, regional and national groups to advocate for clean rivers and streams in all communities in the Chesapeake region.
Reconstituting the Swamp!!
Welcome to Trumpland. It’s going to be soooo great!
As I’ve said before and will state again (he gives me so may opportunities to do so), “Just another one-percent’er taking money from the 99% and giving in return a wasteland of his making and telling us how great it is since he doesn’t have to live there.” Can’t wait for that Trumpcare to kick in, 200% higher costs, 500% higher deductibles and no coverage. Making America great again!
We have been cleaning up the bay for the past 40 years. By now it should be the cleanest body of water anywhere. We have less farmlands to pollute. I do not understand why the bay is still polluted. Maybe we need to limit the use of it by pleasure boats, like we regulate the striped bass fishing, crabbing and oystering.
Obviously another Trump supporter who can’t deal with reality so they turn to “alt-facts” to support a morally, ethically and factually bankrupt view of the world. The problem is that those little family farms don’t exist anymore. Replaced by industrialized corporate owned farms that raise 10 times the amount of livestock or more on the same ground. Not to mention the sewers meant to handle a fraction of the pollution and runoff they were intended to. Yes Jean, infrastructure, just a Trump keeps ranting about. That’s where that EPA money used to go. Now it won’t.
So please feel free the next time you pass an industrial hog farm to get your lazy fat butt out of your car and take a dive into the waste retaining pond and wallow in the waste as you would have us do with your short-sighted, ignorant stance on problems that affect us all.
“Death of Democracy”, You should high five a bus.
Or in your case an Amtrak train.
Unbelievable.
Why not tax the 13 millions people in the six states that are benefitting from the Bay rather than the other 300 million who are not? This is a regional issue and should be managed as such. Why should a taxpayer in Arizona be paying for bay cleanup caused by the locals? With the billions EPA has spent over the years, we should have the cleanest environment on earth (with the possible exception of the river they ruined a couple years ago with zero accountability).
The Chesapeake Bay is a regional issue, not federal.
Maybe you don’t how these things work, like the Bay for instance. Its not like washing your car and saying Walaa! All clean. You flush your toilet, industries discharge, farms contribute. It a dynamic environment so it gets crapped up easy. Plant life and water biology that would normally help keep it clean are killed and the survivors cant keep up. If you want a dead polluted river and bay, go to Russia and keep your ignorant comments to your self, unless you like being called and idiot for your inability to see the basic picture.
73 million is a drop in the bucket compared what it will cost now that the small streams will be removed from the CWA. Somehow they don’t think the small streams flow into the bigger ones. Newsflash. We need water to sustain life. And if you are thinking bottled will get you through, guess where that comes from?
As far as a regional issue, I cant disagree.
No, it’s not a regional issue. There was once a time, not too long ago when Maryland blue crabs and oysters used to be on the menu in California, Montana and Wisconsin. How quickly we forget.
That is true, but when the blue crabs and oysters were found on menus all over the country, we didn’t give them away for free. The profit stayed in Maryland and Virginia. Soo…you will probably get no sympathy for your argument. Just sayin…
Same could be said of the infrastructure improvements Trump proposes. What good does a highway I don’t travel on do me? Nothing, right? We can completely ignore the restaurant that sold the seafood, the wholesaler the restaurant bought it from, and the trucker that got it there. Again it is short sighted to believe that what we do in one part of the country has no repercussions anywhere else. This is exactly why we now buy crabs and oysters from Asia, contributing to the trade deficit and are subject to previously unheard of contaminants and diseases never before seen in this country. The quality of our waterways and off shore habitat is a national concern just as much as farms, highways, airports and roads. It IS a vital part of our national infrastructure and food security. Just as the US oil boom at the beginning of this century enabled us to once again be energy independent, so too can we be food independent with just a little attention to the habitat that we grow that food in. Open your eyes and stop paying attention to alt-facts.
I said my piece and it was with the defunding. I don’t care to pick up the rest of the debate because I just don’t care, I don’t have a positon on whether it’s a regional issue or not. I stated I couldn’t disagree with the original poster’s comment. I still don’t. Piss off and leave me alone.
Ms Moderate
Take a chill pill sister. This is an open forum and not directed at you personally. When you make a comment, you ipso facto open yourself to remarks by others.
Maybe you eat those crabs and oysters from Asia but I don’t. I eat mine from US waters and enjoy them almost every day.
Your comments are really about Trump, who has been in office for fewer than 60 days. Wherever we are in this country regarding our food sources, we didn’t get here because of Trump.
Feel free to eat your food from Asia or wherever else you get it. And while you are at it take your alt-facts and alt-blame and go fuck yourself.
As for me, I’m having another beer and another dozen oysters.
I’m with Ralph, if you are going to eat something caught from polluted waters full of chemicals and crap it might as well be American. Ain’t nuttin tastes like those wye river crabs they catch under the key bridge.
Ya just gotta love when folks have no facts to backup their claims, they have to resort to name calling and profanity. Get over it.
First off, it’s a proposed budget. When was the last time a president’s proposed budget went through unaltered – or even at all? But, let me get this right, the “over 13 million people from six different states and the District of Columbia (that) rely on the Bay’s rivers and streams to provide the water that they drink” and the “Tens of thousands of members of the tourism and fishing industry” that depend on “the Bay’s economic worth estimated at over $1 trillion” can’t come up with the $73 million needed by the 226 organizations (seriously? No chance of duplication there, right?) that depend on the money to do… something… I don’t even know since every time I see cleanup activities they’re being done by volunteers. Maybe it takes millions of dollars to organize volunteers. The folks in Montana don’t need to be paying for Bay cleanup. If the Fed’s want to do something useful, they could levy crushing fines on polluters (yes, I know the polluters donate heavily to the slimy politicians that pressure EPA to lay off, but maybe they could do the right thing for a change) to both discourage repeat offenses and finance the “cleanup” efforts.
As long as more people move into the Chesapeake Bay watershed there will be more pollution. People cause pollution therefore more people equal more pollution and the population of Maryland and the US is growing hourly.
Ms Moderate And Death of Democracy,
Your point is well made. Having read Trump’s “Blueprint” I understand that he is thinking nationally and attempting to eliminate federal funding of programs that benefit a limited regional area.
Trump needs to know how cleaning up The Bay will help the federal taxpaying folks living in Utah.
We need to give Trump (and his Wall St lackeys) more input like yours to prove why the Bay is a National (as opposed to regional) treasure.
Keep up the good work.
So, I’ve only lived in Maryland for about 7 years. I don’t have a lifetime of regional knowledge.
Just how dirty is the bay? how dirty was it? What level of progress has been made?
How long has it been dirty. My guess would be about forever. I know the Bay has always ben a haven for geese, not the cleanest critters in the world.
My other guess is that many of the Clean the Bay folks want pristine yet don’t know what pristine is. How much bacteria is in the Bay compared to 20 years ago, in ppm.
A simple declaration that by cancelling some funding will kill the bay is about as pie in the sky as saying that $73,000,000 will bring it to pristine.
A truth of environmentalists is that they are never satisfied because they don’t publish measurable and attainable goals. Assume the bay has 200ppm of bacteria (Just making it up) 0 ppm is the goal, then a dog urinates in the bay, resulting in bacteria added above 0 ppm.
However, if a safe level of bacteria is 190 ppm, cleaning it up to a safe level is attainable if the goal is 190. A goal of zero is unattainable and is a complete waste of resources to try because it’s nothing but a hole that money is thrown into.
That said, our government is hugely bloated and spending money that we do not have. I support the budget.
If you support the budget, why did you waste your time with the first 7 paragraphs? Other than the questions you ask make no sense because you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, why make some one try to answer them if you support the budget. You just wasted your time and every other person that reads the board with your nonsense.
The fact that you are talking about bacteria levels but don’t mention alge once really reveals that you don’t know about the bay. Before you go criticizing environmentalists, please educate yourself.
If bacteria was the bays problem it would be simple to clean up.
Thanks for playing
Point well made. Thank you.
Gotta LOVE the lib Headline…..