After 10 years and millions of dollars spent, scientists, government officials and environmentalists agree that the latest agreement to restore the Chesapeake Bay will fall short of its 2025 deadline. So what now?

The path forward became a bit more clear Monday, after a key Chesapeake Bay Program committee released its suggestions for “Beyond 2025,” opening a 60-day public comment period.

Under the committee’s plan, the Bay Program, a partnership of the states, including Maryland, in the bay’s watershed and federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, would edit that decade-old bay agreement, said Anna Killius, a chair of the “Beyond 2025” committee and executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. Officials will change some goals and provide more time for others, rather than starting over with an entirely new agreement, she said.

“This isn’t the time to throw this plan out — throw this agreement out — and start afresh,” Killius said. “This agreement has accomplished good things and we’ve made a lot of progress under it. But it probably needs a refresh.”

If the Bay Program’s executive council signs off on the “Beyond 2025” plan in December, that editing process would begin, with initial edits due by December 2025. But the plan allows some of the edits to spill over into 2026, a provision that some bay advocates and politicians resisted.

The “Beyond 2025” plan also calls on the executive council — which includes the governors of all six bay states, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and the EPA administrator, among others — to “affirm its continued commitment” to the bay agreement at its next meeting in December.

Such a gesture would be meaningful because, by some measures, the Bay Program needs to be jolted out of its inertia, said Keisha Sedlacek of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. One symptom? At the last executive council meeting, most of the governors and the EPA administrator sent deputies rather than attending in person.

“You just don’t have that same sort of momentum pushing everyone towards change,” said Sedlacek, the nonprofit’s federal director.

Bay Program leaders and environmentalists point to a number of the 2014 agreement’s successes. Eighteen of its 31 goals have been completed or are on track to be completed by 2025.

Years ahead of schedule, the bay states reached a goal to reopen 1,000 miles of streams to migrating fish, by removing blockages such as dams. The states have opened 248 new public access sites in the bay watershed, nearly reaching a goal of 300. The states have kept the blue crab fishery above minimum thresholds and added more than 1,500 acres of oyster habitat.

But the states will not accomplish what many consider their central goal — curtailing the flow of harmful nutrient and sediment runoff into the Chesapeake, in accordance with the legally enforceable “pollution diet” set by the EPA.

The nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus are the chief contributors to low-oxygen “dead zone” conditions in the bay that endanger fish, crabs and oysters, particularly in the warmest months of the year.

Researchers have found that many of the bay states racked up early reductions in nutrient pollution by paying for upgrades to wastewater treatment plants. But reducing nutrient runoff from other places proved more challenging, including copious farmlands rich with fertilizers and laden with animal waste, and urban and suburban areas full of cement and asphalt.

As of 2023, the bay states had completed 57% of their pledged reduction of nitrogen and 67% of their phosphorus pledge for 2025.

Maryland performed better than many of its neighbors, reducing sediment and phosphorus as promised, but lagging behind on nitrogen. It had completed 83% of its nitrogen pledge by 2023.

Pennsylvania has long attracted the ire of bay advocates (and at times government officials) for dragging its feet on meeting the bay goals. As of 2023, Maryland’s northern neighbor had achieved 29% of its nitrogen reduction goal, 50% for phosphorus and 58% for sediment.

The EPA “remains committed” to the current targets in its pollution diet, known as the “total maximum daily load,” or TMDL, said Adam Ortiz, the EPA administrator in charge of the mid-Atlantic region. Any changes to those numbers would be separate from the “Beyond 2025” process, which involves a voluntary agreement between the bay states. Any alterations would be handled by the EPA, in accordance with the federal Clean Water Act.

“We’re constantly reviewing and evaluating,” Ortiz said of the TMDL. “And the Chesapeake Bay always is a point of focus and sensitivity among the staff in our water program in Philadelphia.”

In a June 24 letter to Bay Program leaders about “Beyond 2025”, 25 members of Congress — a bipartisan group that included several representatives from Maryland — wrote that it is “imperative” that the states “evaluate, amend and recommit” to the bay agreement by the end of 2025 “to build on four decades of progress.”

But it may not be that simple, said Martha Shimkin, the Bay Program’s director and co-chair of the “Beyond 2025” committee.

To edit the bay agreement, originally signed in 2014, officials will have to come up with fresh goals to replace those achieved, and reconfigure the goals that didn’t come to fruition. They’ll have to take into account new knowledge about climate change and its impact on the bay. They’ll have to include a new focus on shallow water habitats, per scientific guidance. Doing so may require fresh data and modeling.

“It’s hard to say: Oh, by this certain date, have it all done. And it turns out: Oh, we didn’t have the data yet for one of them,” Shimkin said. “But we had to write something, and now it’s not doable.”

Ortiz said he’s optimistic that the bay cleanup’s next phase will be brighter.

“Everybody is stepping up,” he said. “West Virginia is one of the reddest states in the union. They’re fully engaged. And Maryland, which is on the other end of the spectrum, is fully engaged. That’s not insignificant.”

But some who’ve watched the “Beyond 2025” process over the past year remain worried it hasn’t gone far enough. For example, there aren’t any changes to how the bay states are held accountable when they fall short, said Evan Isaacson, a senior attorney at the Chesapeake Legal Alliance.

“I want to be able to point to something that says: This is going to meaningfully change the trajectory of bay restoration,” Isaacson said. “And I’m at a loss to point to it.”

In June, Jon Mueller, formerly the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s vice president for litigation, published an article in The Environmental Law Reporter focused on the failure of the TMDL. He argued that the EPA had the tools to compel the bay states to reduce pollution — but has largely failed to wield them.

The EPA could expand the purview of environmental permitting, add new conditions to grant funding, and take other steps under the Clean Water Act to get the bay states into line, Mueller wrote.

“It’s political,” said Mueller, a visiting associate professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “The biggest problem right now is agriculture and urban and suburban stormwater. Those two sectors carry a lot of political weight.”

Under the Biden administration, the EPA has publicly taken a more aggressive posture in Pennsylvania — upping the number of inspections on farms and livestock operations. At the same time, the agency is pushing for more resources for farmers to follow best practices such as planting tree buffers to protect streams from runoff. Ortiz frequently calls the agency’s approach “tough love.”

Ortiz said he feels the agency has deployed all of its most effective tools to make the states comply. And going too far comes with a risk.

“Speaking for EPA, we have to stay within our authorities,” Ortiz said. “If we don’t, we can be challenged. And this is a Supreme Court that has not supported agency positions on a variety of issues, from climate change to the waters of the U.S.”

Larry Sanford — a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who sat on the “Beyond 2025” committee — said the plan ideally would have leaned harder on a key scientific report released last year, to which he contributed.

Called the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response, or CESR report (often pronounced “Caesar”), the study faulted the Bay cleanup effort for focusing excessively on restoring the deepest trench of the Chesapeake, where oxygen conditions are poorest, by curtailing nutrients. Easier, incremental improvements like rebuilding shallow-water habitats should be a bigger focus moving forward, it stated.

Maryland officials were the first to publicly embrace the report’s findings. Gov. Wes Moore enacted an executive order to refocus Maryland’s bay cleanup in line with the committee’s report.

For Sanford, it all clicked on a recent boating trip to the Susquehanna Flats, an underwater grass habitat at the Susquehanna River’s mouth that has seen great regrowth after Hurricane Agnes’ decimation in 1972.

“You can see 10 feet, crystal clear — all kinds of living things, grasses all over the place, sunlight sparkling on the bottom,” Sanford said. “It’s just: Wow, this is what it could be like.”