West Virginia daily

U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., asked President Bush yesterday for White House help in "expediting" the Chesapeake Bay cleanup that a federal review criticized.

A federal Government Accountability Office report, issued yesterday, faulted the 22-year-old cleanup effort for failing to clearly communicate conditions in the polluted estuary and sometimes substituting computer predictions for real-life data on the bay's condition.

The letter from Warner and Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes, both Maryland Democrats, urged Bush to launch a White House task force for "a top-to-bottom review of all federal programs, resources and regulatory tools that can be directed toward expediting restoration of the Chesapeake Bay."

Yesterday's GAO report compiled the first account of what has been spent to improve the sprawling estuary whose watershed stretches through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York.

The report said $5.6 billion in direct and indirect funds from 11 federal agencies, the states of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia had been poured into the effort from 1995 to 2004.

A summary of the GAO report said the bay program's periodic reports on the state of the bay "do not effectively communicate the bay's current conditions. . . .

Moreover," the summary continued, "the credibility of these reports has been negatively impacted because the program has commingled various kinds of data such as monitoring data" and computer model predictions "without clearly distinguishing among them."

The summary also said the bay program lacks a blueprint for meeting the steep restoration goals that the governors of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Environmental Protection Agency set five years ago.

During a conference call, Rebecca Hamner, director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program Office, said her office generally agreed with the GAO's findings and said it was already addressing changes, but she added that individual officials vigorously objected to some of the report's characterizations.

"We took great issue that the bay program or its partners are not a credible source of information," said Russell W. Baxter, Virginia's deputy secretary of natural resources. "We have been absolutely forthright that the bay is in a desperate condition and we need to spend billions of dollars to fix it."

But Ann Swanson, director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which is composed of state lawmakers in the bay region, agreed that "we need to make a better effort" at distinguishing between empirical data and computer projections.

The bay program has long used computer models and monitoring of actual water conditions to assess the estuary's condition and provide a measure of cleanup progress.

It has used models to predict how reductions in pollutants would improve water quality. It has used monitoring data, such as water samples that show pollutant content, to establish current conditions.

A Washington Post article in 2004 on the two methods prompted Warner and the other senators to ask the GAO to review the program and determine the extent that the reporting methods accurately describe the bay's health.

Hamner said yesterday that there will still be a role for computer predictions, especially as officials determine the level of pollution controls needed to spark improvements in water quality.

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