An Open Letter to the EPA
Dear EPA Officials,
It is with profound disappointment that I write you after spending 50 years fighting for conservation measures and the Chesapeake’s restoration. My column below details my sadness at yet another failure of the Bay states to meet pollution reductions by wide margins without any EPA sanctions.
Instead, the Environmental Protection Agency–the enforcement agency for the Clean Water Act–joined the states in a “recalibration” to take another year with zero new requirements for the states to adopt regulatory measures to meet agricultural and urban stormwater nitrogen and phosphorus reductions set by the EPA in 2010. The EPA gave the states 15 years to meet these reductions after 27 years of their failure to meet reductions agreed upon under Bay Agreement, all without EPA enforced consequences. A law that goes unenforced is no law at all.
I see this as a politicization of the process, the EPA coming up with nice verbiage like “recalibration” to avoid enforcing our bedrock clean water law and thus creating blowback. Harry Truman famously noted “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
The best measurement of success of failure is the attached EPA chart showing progress in meeting the three water quality conditions driving the TMDL: DO, chlorophyll A, and water clarity. The actual monitoring showed that in 2020, only 29% of the Bay’s tidal waters met CWA requirements for these vital water quality requirements. In 1985 when measurements began by EPA, it was 26%.
Besides the failure to improve water quality to meet basic CWA requirements, the results are collapsed or collapsing living resources, including Bay grasses, and flesh-eating infections from Bay water contact threatening humans limbs and lives.
Here’s one of many that I have written about. The newspapers would not publish the photos people sent me of their flesh being attacked, but you can read my columns on these diseases and what needs to be done to prevent them. See the attachments. .
Below is one example of these failures. This is Matt’s leg after contracting vibrio vulnificus from a cut tending his boat in Kent Island water. Sent to UMD Shock Trauma Center, hospitalized for one month, he still has minimal feeling in his leg, has bad nerve pain all day, and the /main vein in his leg was removed. 
These infections are occurring with greater frequency brought on by the failure to curb water-fouling nutrients.
Listening to the speakers at the Chesapeake Executive Council praise their efforts and accomplishments one would think all was well and we were succeeding and on target.
Maybe you all can meet with the victims and explaining as at the meeting the great job the EPA and Bay states have done and are doing and he great successes. I get to see and hear these peoples’ stories and it sickens me that I fear for my grandchildren, nieces, and nephews safety from crabbing and swimming in the waters of Oyster Creek and the Bay where I live. I have the same fears.
I feel I have failed.
Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?
I hope you will take the time to read the column below.
Gerald W. Winegrad chaired the Maryland Senate’s Environment and Chesapeake Bay Subcommittee and has been a recreational crabber for more than a half-century from Norfolk to Annapolis.