The Charge for the Chesapeake Action Plan

In October 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published Chesapeake Bay Program: Improved Strategies Are Needed to Better Assess, Report, and Manage Restoration Progress [GAO-06-96]. In that report, GAO set forth the following recommendations and actions for implementing those recommendations:

To improve the methods used by the Bay Program to assess progress made on the restoration effort, we recommend that the Administrator of EPA instruct the Chesapeake Bay Program to complete its plans to develop and implement an integrated approach to assess overall restoration progress. In doing so, the Chesapeake Bay Program Office should ensure that this integrated approach clearly ties to the five broad restoration goals identified in Chesapeake 2000.

To improve the effectiveness and credibility of the Bay Program’s reports on the health of the bay, we recommend that the Administrator of EPA instruct the Chesapeake Bay Program Office to revise its reporting approach:

• include an assessment of the key ecological attributes that reflect the bay’s current health conditions,
• report separately on the health of the bay and on the progress made in implementing management actions, and
• establish an independent and objective reporting process.

To ensure that the Bay Program is man-aged and coordinated effectively, we also recommend that the Administrator of EPA instruct the Chesapeake Bay Program Office to work with the Bay Program partners to take the following two actions:

• develop an overall, coordinated implementation strategy that unifies the program’s various planning documents, and
• establish a means to better target its limited resources to ensure that the most effective and realistic work plans are developed and implemented.  

In addition to the GAO report, report language attached to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 provided further direction to the Chesapeake Bay Program:

Directives for specific geographic programs are as follows:

1. Chesapeake Bay Program:

$31,000,000 for this program, instead of $30,000,000 proposed by the House and $32,812,000 proposed by the Senate. The Agency is directed to allocate the Chesapeake Bay funding as follows:

• $21,000,000 for base programs;
• $8,000,000 for Targeted Watershed Grants;
• $2,000,000 for Small Watershed Grants.

The Agency is further directed to implement immediately all of the recommendations contained in the October, 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Of the funds provided to the Bay Program and the Office of the Administrator of EPA, $5,000,000 in administrative funds shall not become available until 60 days after the EPA Administrator submits a report to the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and to the Comptroller General stating, with supporting evidence, that EPA has implemented the recommendations contained in the GAO report.

In addition, the Agency is directed to develop a Chesapeake Bay action plan for the remaining years of the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement. This plan must: (1) clearly articulate realistic targets the Chesapeake Bay Program expects to achieve in each of the remaining years; (2) describe the actual activities the Chesapeake Bay Program will implement in each year to achieve these annual tar-gets; (3) identify the amount and source of funding that will be used to accomplish each of these activities; and, (4) describe the process the Chesapeake Bay Pro-gram will use to track and measure the progress of these actions. Finally, the GAO is directed to conduct periodic performance assessments of progress made on this action plan.

CBP Response to Recommendations

The CBP partners agree with Congress and GAO on the need to continually improve the effectiveness of the program and to accelerate the restoration and protection of the Chesapeake Bay. As a whole, the CAP represents a significant transformation of the way CBP operates.

The components of the CAP promote a strategic approach to:

• Enhance coordination among CBP partners.
• Engage CBP partners in continual evaluation of efforts to protect and restore the Bay and its watershed.
• Increase the transparency of CBP’s operations for partners and the public.
• Heighten the level of accountability of CBP as a whole and of the CBP partners for meeting their goals for Bay health and restoration.

The CBP partners appreciate the interest of Congress and GAO in the program, and believe that the implementation of these recommendations provides the program with new opportunities to increase cooperation and accountability that will lead to better progress in improving the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

Achieving the level of integration, stakeholder coordination, and continual performance improvement called for by the CAP depends on new approaches to the overall management of the Chesapeake Bay Program. Therefore, to support the CAP, CBP is implementing an adaptive management approach.

Complementary to the adaptive management approach of synchronizing efforts throughout the program, CBP partners organized the multitude of separate agreements, policies, strategies, and plans under the five broad strategic themes of the Chesapeake 2000 agreement and provided a status updates on each initiative.