Water quality in the Inner Harbor received more failing grades this week. This should come as no great surprise to anyone living anywhere near the Patapsco River drainage basin. As with a student who skips every class for a semester and then flunks the finals, the “F”s given the Inner Harbor and tidal Patapsco for 2015 were well-deserved.

It's unfortunate that the latest report card from the Waterfront Partnership's Healthy Harbor Initiative is presented in the context of swimming, given the city's formidable pollution legacy. Six years ago, the group set the ambitious goal of having a swimmable and fishable Inner Harbor by 2020. While there have been some modest improvements over time (including a more gentlemanly “D” for the Gwynns Falls), that goal appears to be doubtful now.

But here's another way of looking at the problem: How about an Inner Harbor that doesn't represent a serious public health threat by 2020? That, alas, is closer to where the cleanup effort stands — if only because Baltimore has done such a terrible job of addressing its sewage and stormwater spills.

In Baltimore, heavy showers don't just lead to April flowers, they unleash massive sewer overflows. Aging sewage pipes fill with stormwater inflow and then reach a bottleneck — a misaligned pipe in East Baltimore leading to the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant. That, in turn, causes enormous sewage backups into the basements of city residents and eventually overflows into the Jones Falls and Inner Harbor. It doesn't take a scientist to recognize that millions of gallons of untreated sewage pose unhealthy consequences and not just for wildlife.

This is hardly a new development, but it was supposed to be largely fixed by now under terms of the 2002 consent decree involving the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland Department of the Environment. Baltimore blew the January deadline and is now only getting around to engineering a possible fix — pumps and storage tanks to bypass the problem pipe.

City officials like to point out that neglected infrastructure is a problem for many U.S. cities, and they are correct. Congress ought to be allocating far more money for highways, bridges, rail lines, transit, water and sewer systems, the energy grid, air traffic control, and on and on. The failure to keep up with demand — and decay — is its own kind of deficit, a massive and costly problem we are leaving to future generations.

But there are also legitimate concerns over whether Baltimore has dragged its feet over those 14 years, how closely water-quality problems are monitored and whether state and federal regulators are up to the task. As we have noted before, there is a clear lack of transparency on the subject — the public is largely kept out of the loop when it comes to pollution discharges and cleanup negotiations among the parties.

Even now, the city is poised to make a $500 million-plus public investment in Port Covington, a project with a multibillion-dollar economic potential. Yet one of the keys to that ambitious development is its waterfront location. How desirable will that shoreline seem to Under Armour or Sagamore's other potential customers if it has to be posted with warning signs: “Danger. Do not make contact. High concentrations of bacteria and human pathogens”?

In retrospect, it is quite shocking that Baltimore's mayoral primary came and went last month without much public discussion of the pollution threat. As a study released in December noted, at least 337 million gallons of raw sewage have been discharged into the harbor over the last five years. That's the equivalent of more than 510 Olympic-size, 50-meter-long and 25-meter-wide swimming pools. And it's not as if city residents haven't been billed for the cleanup costs — water and sewer rates have been raised repeatedly, and the city has collected an estimated $2 billion from ratepayers since the consent decree was signed.

What is needed now is a new consent decree with tough standards and a timetable that the parties will stand behind as well as a court-appointed monitor. Make no mistake, the news isn't all bad. The privately funded trash wheel at the mouth of the Jones Falls has collected hundreds of tons of litter, and private nonprofit groups like Blue Water Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation have helped stoke interest in cleanup efforts. It's simply time to expect more from city government — perhaps by having the next batch of elected city officials swim the Inner Harbor in 2020, preferably right after a big storm.