Recent Actions by the Chesapeake Bay Program Are Positive Steps Toward More Effectively Guiding the Restoration Effort, but Additional Steps Are Needed

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1983, the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; the District of Columbia; the Chesapeake Bay Commission; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have partnered to protect and restore the deteriorated Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. The partners established the Chesapeake Bay Program (Bay Program) to manage and coordinate a variety of restoration activities and in their most recent agreement, Chesapeake 2000, which was signed in June 2000, they established 102 commitments for the Chesapeake Bay, which were organized under five broad restoration goals to be achieved by 2010. In October 2005, we issued a report in which we reviewed the management, coordination, and reporting mechanisms used by the Bay Program. Our review found that the Bay Program had (1) developed more than 100 measures of restoration but lacked an integrated approach for measuring the progress being made in restoring the bay, (2) reported on individual species and pollutants but lacked independent and credible mechanisms to report on overall bay health, and (3) developed numerous plans for accomplishing its restoration commitments but lacked a comprehensive strategy that could provide a roadmap for accomplishing the goals outlined in Chesapeake 2000, and (4) used its limited resources to develop plans that could not be implemented within available funding levels and was limited in its ability to target and direct funding to those restoration activities that will be the most cost effective and beneficial. To address these concerns, we recommended that the Bay Program take the following six actions: (1) develop and implement an integrated approach for measuring overall restoration progress, (2) revise its reporting approach to include an assessment of key ecological attributes that reflect the bay's health, (3) report separately on the health of the bay and the progress made in implementing management actions, (4) establish an independent and objective reporting process, (5) develop a coordinated implementation strategy that unifies its various planning documents, and (6)establish a means to better target its limited resources to the most cost-effective restoration activities. In December 2007, the Congress enacted the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (Pub. L. No. 110-161). An accompanying explanatory statement of the House Committee on Appropriations directed EPA to (1) immediately implement all of the recommendations in our report and (2) submit a report to the Congress demonstrating that our recommendations have been implemented. Following the submission of EPA's July 2008 report to the Congress entitled Strengthening the Management, Coordination, and Accountability of the Chesapeake Bay Program, Congress asked GAO to provide an assessment of the steps taken by the Bay Program to address our 2005 recommendations.