When the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania first convened to forge an alliance for the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay in 1983, they couldn’t have known how much time — or money — it would take to realize their dream.

Four decades and more than a few billion dollars later, the work continues. The regional partnership, which today encompasses six states, Washington, D.C., and federal agencies, fell short of key pollution deadlines this year, and a rehashed agreement delays new targets to 2040.

Leaders of this long effort will convene in Baltimore in December to sign their new pact, the fifth since that inaugural 1983 conference. After staff spent nearly a year hashing out the new terms, the governors’ signatures are a formality.

The plan, though, didn’t come together easily.

An earlier version faced criticism this summer as environmentalists, scientists and members of Congress blasted the draft in hundreds of pages of comments for forsaking deadlines and scaling back ambitions.

Since then, officials at the Chesapeake Bay Program, the federally funded bureaucracy that coordinates restoration across the watershed, hammered out a version many environmentalists find more palatable, though some still wish for more.

Officials from Maryland, home to the Chesapeake’s largest and most depleted waters, had pushed for loftier goals but were outvoted by other states. While the new agreement may not aim as high as its predecessor, signed in 2014, Maryland leaders nonetheless touted the final product as a strong roadmap for the next 15 years.

“What we can’t do is set goals that are purely ambitious,” said Maryland Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz, who also chaired the Bay Program committee charged with writing the new agreement.

Kurtz sees the final version as a balance of “implementation and ambition” that he believes will drive stronger results.

350 years to meet standards

Champions of the nation’s largest estuary got a reality check in the last decade when their effort fell short of its goals, including stemming the nutrient pollution that hampers water quality.

Across the watershed, the percentage of the bay and its tributaries that meet water quality standards is just 3% higher today than in the late 1980s. Waves of nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment still wash off farm fields and flow to the bay, where the pollutants suffocate underwater life and drive oxygen-depleted “dead zones.”

At this pace, advocates and scientists point out, it will take up to 350 years for the entire watershed to meet its water quality standards.

Don Boesch, the former longtime head of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, is convinced the effort doesn’t need nearly that long. He sees the agreement as a significant improvement over the original draft, which had no timeline for reducing nutrient runoff and neglected to mention legal limits on pollution that can flow into the bay watershed.

Still, Boesch expressed concern about stretching deadlines to 2040. The restoration has made headway on some key issues, such as nitrogen pollution, but with a due date almost four electoral cycles away, he worries there’s little incentive for politicians to push for short-term improvements.

Officials often insist on realistic goals, but to the longtime bay scientist, that can look more like a preference for targets that are easy to achieve.

“The sense of urgency is really absent,” Boesch said.

Environmental programs cut

Today’s restoration effort faces new stressors from the Trump administration’s cuts to environmental programs, including at agencies central to the bay restoration: the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Nowhere in the 15-page document do the words “climate change” appear, replaced by the term “changing environmental conditions” in response to President Donald Trump’s attacks on climate spending. Meanwhile, diversity-focused commitments were stripped from the plan.

Rachel Felver, a spokesperson for the EPA-funded Chesapeake Bay Program, said she was unable to speak for other federal agencies because of the ongoing federal shutdown, but she said partners in the restoration feel “excitement and pride” about what they’ve accomplished this year.

Felver said the restoration’s executive council is set to ratify the agreement at its Dec. 2 meeting at Baltimore’s National Aquarium, regardless of whether the federal government remains closed.

A spokesperson for the EPA, the only federal agency whose staff could attend Bay Program meetings since the shutdown began, said it remains committed to finalizing the agreement next month.

New pollution goals

Given the circumstances, Keisha Sedlacek, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s federal director, sees the agreement as a strong enough foundation, but finds some of the particulars lacking.

Sedlacek cited diminished goals for preserving undeveloped lands, which shield waterways from urban and farm runoff. Bay states are pledging to conserve 2 million acres by 2040, half a million less than the nonprofit dedicated to restoration wanted. Alongside Maryland and Virginia officials, the Bay Foundation pushed for a 2035 deadline.

The new agreement’s protracted deadline is driven partly by the Bay Program’s need to update the computer models it uses to track nutrient pollution, a project it doesn’t expect to complete until 2030.

The states do face a midpoint assessment in 2033 — the partnership’s 50th anniversary — a benchmark, Kurtz said, that provides shorter-term accountability.

For some longtime critics of the restoration, recent changes to the agreement are distinctions with little difference.

Fred Tutman, riverkeeper of the Patuxent River, considers these pacts a predictable routine. Leaders gather every 10 years or so and enact a new edition.

“Everybody signs it, wink-wink, nod-nod,” he said, “with no indication that it’s going to actually do anything.”

Tutman criticized the partnership’s voluntary approach and lack of enforcement for its pollution commitments.

Kristin Reilly, director of the Annapolis-based Choose Clean Water Coalition, said the more limited goals for protected lands and establishing new public access to the bay disappointed her.

She isn’t convinced that the 2040 deadlines will challenge states, but she was encouraged to see federal workers shepherd this agreement amid many obstacles to their work.

Goals that were met

The last 10 years haven’t been all disappointment.

While the restoration fell short of its core water quality goals, it met others: Maryland and Virginia restored oyster populations in 10 targeted tributaries — plus a bonus river — while states reopened more than 130 miles of migratory pathways for fish and collectively added over 300 new public access sites and are on track to put 2 million acres of land into conservation protection.

These achievements prove that the partnership can meet and surpass its goals, said Leila Duman, Chesapeake and coastal bays restoration officer for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

And just because some new goals are achievable sooner than 2040, Duman added, doesn’t mean Maryland will stop once it reaches them.

All agree the job isn’t getting easier. Climate change and a growing population across the watershed add new pressures for the ailing estuary.

Even if states meet all of their goals this time, work will go on, said the Bay Foundation’s Sedlacek.

The cleanup won’t end in 2040.

“We’re never going to walk away from that,” she said.