The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s 2004 State of the Bay Report gives the health of the Bay a below passing grade. The report, released this week, grades the health of the Bay a “D,” with a health index rating of 27, the same as last year’s score.

The State of the Bay Report, which CBF issued for the first time in 1998, is a comprehensive measure of the Bay's health. For the report, CBF evaluates 13 indicators: oysters, shad, underwater grasses, wetlands, forested buffers, toxics, water clarity, dissolved oxygen, crabs, striped bass (rockfish), resource lands, phosphorus, and nitrogen. CBF scientists compile and examine the best available historical and up-to-date information for each indicator and assign it an index score and letter grade.

Taken together, these indicators offer an assessment of Bay health. The unspoiled Bay serves as CBF's benchmark. That original Bay ecosystem, with its extensive forests and wetlands, clear water, abundant fish and oysters, and lush growths of submerged vegetation, rates a 100 on CBF's scale. While CBF does not expect to see the Bay achieve the pristine state of 100, the current rating of 27 is unacceptable.

In June of 2000, when the states and federal government signed the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, they made a commitment to reduce pollution enough to remove the Bay from the EPA “dirty waters list” by 2010. This accomplishment would achieve a score of approximately 40 on CBF’s Bay health index. Now almost halfway to that deadline, CBF’s State of the Bay Report health index shows no overall progress since last year, and a decline since 2000.

Finding the nation’s largest estuary in peril unless dramatic action is taken soon, the Chesapeake Bay Blue Ribbon Finance Panel this month called on Bay jurisdictions and the federal government to make a six-year, $15 billion investment to reduce pollution in the Bay. The report, titled Saving a National Treasure: Financing the

Cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, also called for the creation of a regional financing authority charged with prioritizing and distributing restoration funds throughout the Bay's 64,000-square-mile watershed.

Another report, issued this month by the Chesapeake Bay Commission, identified the most cost effective strategies to reduce pollution, suggesting the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars. The report’s top choice is to utilize available, affordable technology to reduce pollution from sewage treatment plants.

12/3/2004