It wasn’t long ago that the partnership of states working to clean up the Chesapeake Bay was characterized more by internal squabbling than environmental progress.

Just a few years ago, finger-pointing and partisan bickering marred the relationship between the watershed’s “big three” states: Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Maryland and Virginia sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the effort, saying it wasn’t holding Pennsylvania accountable for sending pollution into the bay.

Things feel a bit more collegial today.

The governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia — Democrats Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro, alongside Republican Glenn Youngkin — are expected to convene Tuesday in Annapolis to symbolically reaffirm their commitments to the bay restoration and approve plans to map out a new strategy for addressing pollution in the watershed over the next 12 months.

Some bipartisan backslapping will surely follow. It won’t be lost on those in the room that any — or each — of them could one day be president.

This summit could easily turn dour: The Chesapeake Bay Program’s executive council is convening in part to discuss important pollution goals they’d long hoped to meet by 2025, but won’t. At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to retake the White House, re-igniting fears that he could dismantle environmental regulations and again try to cut federal funding for the bay clean-up.

But bay advocates largely expressed optimism ahead of the meeting and welcomed the renewed good will between the states.

“At the beginning of my tenure here in the Biden-Harris administration, we inherited a partnership that was in shambles,” said Adam Ortiz, the top EPA regulator in the mid-Atlantic region. The clean-up was behind schedule, the states were fighting each other and the level of effort was low, said Ortiz.

Today, advocates credit Pennsylvania for finally stepping up to curb pollutants that run from its small family farms into the rivers and streams that feed the Chesapeake. The bay is coming off its highest environmental grade in two decades — a C+, per the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Studies. And the alliance between the watershed states has never been stronger, Ortiz said.

The EPA regulator argued that having three governors with such big profiles aligned around the cleanup bodes well for the effort. The governors of these three states haven’t each been present together for an executive council meeting in a decade, according to an EPA spokesperson — since the 2014 meeting that brokered the effort’s 2025 goals. A Pennsylvania governor, meanwhile, hasn’t attended an executive council meeting since 2016, and Ortiz said it’s hard to overstate the significance of Shapiro showing face.

“It’s like Nixon going into China,” he said.

Even so, advocates want more than a political photo op.

Will Baker, the retired longtime director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said that after close to 40 years of executive council meetings dating back to the mid-1980s, he often came away thinking of an old maxim: “While Rome burned, Nero fiddled.”

Baker said he would be impressed to see the three governors all in attendance, though he cautioned that big names aren’t everything. He hopes it leads to substantive planning for the bay’s future.

Prioritizing the consequences of climate change is crucial, Baker added, part and parcel with restoring the bay. Trump does not share the Biden administration’s concern about climate change, and Baker argued that Virginia’s Youngkin has often aligned with the president-elect.

Among their duties Tuesday, members of the executive council will be asked to approve a new charge, a symbolic document affirming their commitments to the evolving science of the restoration effort that also outlines steps for the Chesapeake Bay Program to revise its foundational 2014 agreement. This recalibration comes as scientists are rethinking the restoration effort’s long-held focus on the oxygen-deprived regions in the bay’s deep waters, and a revised agreement would take into account recommendations proposed this fall for a longer-term, post-2025 strategy.

Ahead of the meeting, spokespeople for both Moore and Youngkin expressed support for the tasks in front of the council, including for reevaluating the agreement over the next year.

“As with any collaborative effort,” said A.J. Metcalf, a spokesman for Moore’s Department of Natural Resources, “we may pursue specific recommendations with more effort than one of our partners may, and vice versa, but that is the nature of collaborative efforts.”

Youngkin’s office did not acknowledge questions about the implications of a Trump administration, but touted an executive order he released last week directing his agencies to reevaluate investments in the bay to bolster Virginia’s clean-up efforts. While he expressed his commitment to the partnership, spokesman Rob Damschen stressed that the approach must prioritize effective government and funding choices while working with farmers to curb pollution through voluntary incentives.

“The role of government is to coordinate and facilitate this progress, not be a barrier to success,” said Damschen.

A spokesperson for Shapiro touted Pennsylvania’s recent work to improve water quality and said the governor looks forward to building on that progress with other state leaders.

Advocates like Keisha Sedlacek, federal director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, stressed that getting state leaders to publicly recommit to the decades-long restoration effort is important at this potentially pivotal moment. That includes not just goals for water quality, but also a sustained focus on the health of plants and underwater life like fish, oysters and crabs.

One big question that remains undecided is when — or whether — the coalition will set new deadlines for their unrealized 2025 goals. Chesapeake Bay Program director Martha Shimkin said that officials aren’t ready to commit to any specific timelines yet.

Sedlacek said revised deadlines should fall within “years, not decades.”

While the effort has come up short on its most important and challenging 2025 goals, Ortiz noted a majority of the targeted outcomes were achieved. The restoration is making incremental progress, Ortiz said, even as their task has gotten more challenging with the growth of population.

“The escalator keeps going,” he said, “even though we’re running down the stairs.”