Chesapeake Bay Program Also has its Success Stories

March 24, 2009 | Restoring Rivers, Clean Water, Greening Water Infrastructure, Most Endangered Rivers

Serena McClain
Director, River Restoration, Federal Grants

Last week the Chesapeake Bay Program released their annual Bay Barometer, which assesses progress toward health and restoration goals in the Chesapeake Bay. All across the region, newspapers blazed with headlines like Bay’s Health Remains Poor, Study Says, Chesapeake Bay Gets Another Poor Score for Health and EPA’s ‘Bay Barometer’ - Still Too Sunny?  and rightly so. However, the story that only managed to garner a couple of sentences in most articles is the restoration successes in the Chesapeake.

According to the Bay Barometer, an additional 51 miles of habitat for migratory fish were restored in 2008. This brings the total number of miles restored in the Bay region to 2,317 miles, which is 83 percent of their goal of 2,807 miles by 2014. These same partners surpassed their 2005 goal of 1,357 miles by 481 miles. Few other workgroups within the Chesapeake Bay Program have made more progress toward their Bay restoration goals. In addition to restoring access to spawning habitat for species like American shad, alewife, blueback herring, and American eel, the benefits of these river restoration projects extend beyond fish passage. They reduce aquatic and riparian habitat fragmentation, restore flow, mediate sediment load, improve water quality, provide opportunities for riparian buffer enhancement an eliminate public safety hazards from communities in the Bay watershed. These projects also generate millions of dollars in non-federal match and, in these fragile economic times, generate jobs in local communities.

Despite these successes, the Chesapeake Bay Program has chosen to cut all funding support for its state fish passage coordinators, positions that are integral to the program’s success and the future of river restoration efforts in the Bay states. They often serve as key emissaries for projects, shepherding them from the initial stages of owner consent through permitting and construction. Without the support of the Chesapeake Bay Program, the states will be hard pressed to come up with the money to fund these positions, and the threat of backsliding on the current successes of this group is very real.

We believe this decision is damaging to the Bay Program’s goal of habitat restoration and continue to urge them to reverse this decision.  

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