While some celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Clean Water Act Tuesday, a group of Chesapeake Bay advocates weren’t in quite as good a mood. They pointed to recent reports that showed most of the Bay states will not meet their 2025 clean-up goals and the Chesapeake Executive Council’s decision last week to rework those goals. And they urged state and federal regulators to get tough with polluters.

Betsy Nicholas, the executive director of Waterkeepers Chesapeake, called an $18,000 fine slapped on a polluter a “pittance and ridiculous" during a virtual news conference. She argued that the most cost effective way to clean up our waterways is to enforce strict rules.

There are plenty who will play by the rules, Nicholas said.

But there are others who believe “there's an economic benefit gained by externalizing your costs, polluting the waterways and making the communities who live downstream clean it up,” she said. “As long as we allow that to continue happening. We're not going to fix this situation.”

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh pointed to a report last spring that found the state’s enforcement of water pollution laws has declined over the last two decades and particularly the last two years.

Part of that decline, he said, stemmed from the decline in the number of inspectors in the state Department of the Environment. There are so few that they can only get around to the businesses for inspections once every five or six years.

“That means 10 years go by before anybody takes any action against the violators,” Frosh said.

And that puts honest businesses at a competitive disadvantage, he added, “because they know that their competitors are cutting corners, saving money by polluting the Chesapeake Bay by polluting the tributaries of the bay.” 

He called on the Environmental Protection Agency to step in when it sees conduct like that and say “we're going to take over this responsibility ourselves, we're going to enforce the law if you're not doing it.”