Bay Program Delays Decision on Tribes’ Place in Chesapeake Agreement

Virginia’s seven federally recognized tribes said they’re cautiously optimistic about their prospects of becoming full signatories to the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement even after program leadership missed the July 1 deadline for presenting a roadmap on how to include the tribal nations, pushing the question to December. 

In its meeting late last year, the Chesapeake Executive Council, which is responsible for policy decisions on the watershed’s restoration, adopted a revised Bay Watershed Agreement, extending the region’s long-missed pollution cleanup timeline to 2040.

The council, chaired at the time by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and now led by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, committed to bringing tribes into the Bay partnership and directed staff to work with the Virginia tribes through the Indigenous Conservation Council of the Chesapeake Bay.

Those recommendations, including pathways for formally adding tribes as signatories to future Bay agreements and establishing an Indigenous Guardianship Program, were due by July 1.

The move signified the first step toward formally inviting Indigenous participation in Bay governance.

But the Principals’ Staff Committee, charged with finalizing the recommendations, at its June 30 meeting voted to delay the decision on how to recognize the tribes in the Bay agreement until December, choosing instead to work on a formal resolution to be presented to the Executive Council at its next meeting. 

“Tribal Nations don’t come empty handed to the table. We bring Indigenous Knowledge that is delivering conservation and restoration results in record time all around the world,” said Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe and Chair of the ICC. In a statement, she said it is imperative that tribal sovereignty and Indigenous knowledge are formally recognized in the Bay partnership as all signatories agreed to do in the revised 2025 Bay Agreement. 

Melissa Ann Ehrenreich, executive director of the Indigenous Conservation Council, attributed the delay to the question of money. In an interview with Inside Climate News, she said funding was “a huge problem that the whole Chesapeake Bay Program was really grappling with.” 

In her assessment, the Bay partners “backed away from the working group because they didn’t have the appetite to figure out how they could fund the tribes to be there.” The program runs on congressional appropriations, which the Environmental Protection Agency disburses to the member states and Washington, D.C.

Ehrenreich said it “felt very much like an argument of scarcity instead of one of possibility.” Tribal representatives and Bay program partners “met twice and then stopped,” Ehrenreich said, never getting to the stage of drafting recommendations. “We didn’t get anywhere close to that over the last six months,” she said of the meetings the EPA Chesapeake Program staff convened. 

The tribes remain cautiously hopeful but will not wait indefinitely, Ehrenreich said. “We’re not happy to sit around for another six months and kick the can down if we don’t get there.” She said tribe representatives were assured the process will result in a “concrete, formal, detailed recommendation” for the executive council to weigh in December. 

Indigenous nations in other regions, such as the Great Lakes, Puget Sound and in California won equal partnership status through legal leverage and “didn’t get there by asking nicely,” she noted. In contrast to that, the Chesapeake tribes are “working amicably” toward the same end, Ehrenreich said. “[All] the chiefs will be meeting the governor [of Virginia] this week. Virginia will be leading the rebooted process under [Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources David] Bulova.” 

“The entire PSC, including Maryland, supported the proposal to work with the Tribal Nations to develop an Executive Council Resolution that establishes the structure of a meaningful partnership between the Tribal Nations and the Chesapeake Bay Program,” said Gregg Bortz, a spokesperson for Maryland Department of Natural Resources, which led the Bay Program’s Principals’ Staff Committee while the state held the Council chair. 

In emailed remarks, Bortz said tribal participation will improve the Bay partnership and the state “looks forward to continuing to work with tribal representatives and the Bay Program to determine how to include them.”

A spokesperson for the EPA’s office for the Mid-Atlantic region said the agency “does not hold sole decision-making authority” within the Bay partnership. The statement said that “EPA will continue to prioritize funding on-the-ground projects that directly reduce nutrient and sediment pollution to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries,” without directly addressing tribes’ concern over funding scarcity. The agency said it has and will continue to “consult with tribes on a government-to-government level.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which now leads the Principals’ Staff Committee, did not respond to questions about the tribes’ inclusion by the time of publication.

Environmentalists and advocates reacted to the missed deadline with dismay. 

“Deliberations on whether to add the tribes as partners have gone on for too long, and we are hopeful and determined to get a strong outcome where tribes are meaningfully included in the partnership by the time the Bay Program’s Chesapeake Executive Council meets in December,” said Keisha Sedlacek, senior policy director for Chesapeake Bay Foundation, in a statement.

Evan Isaacson, senior attorney for the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, called the Chesapeake “an outlier” for not involving tribes in its restoration efforts, compared to many other parts of the country that benefited from formal state-federal-tribal partnership. He said that a delay in involving tribal nations was “as harmful to Bay restoration efforts as it is harmful to the tribes’ own sovereignty and interests.” 

Isaacson noted that the tribal nations’ environmental and natural resource agencies have been indispensable in moving co-stewardship of other waterways forward around the country. “With the missed 2025 deadline [for Bay cleanup], we are supposed to be doing everything we can to accelerate progress, not hinder it,” he said. “This was obviously a missed opportunity.”

Kristin Reilly of the Choose Clean Water Coalition said the entire Bay program was grappling with funding questions because of widespread federal cuts. The program received more than $40 million in funds under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Reilly said, which will be gone when the five-year bill expires, forcing cuts to grants, staff support and monitoring. “[G]iven how state budgets have played out over the last several years,” she said, she “highly doubt[s]” the partner jurisdictions will step in to fill the gap.

The Bay partnership is composed of the governors of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and West Virginia; the mayor of the District of Columbia; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, representing the federal government; and members of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. A tri-state legislative advisory group, the commission coordinates Bay policy among Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania lawmakers.

The previous Bay agreement was signed in 2014 and linked restoration efforts to the federal pollution limits known as Total Maximum Daily Load or TMDL, with a 2025 cleanup deadline. The initial 1987 agreement targeted a 40 percent reduction in nutrient levels by 2000, while the 2000 agreement broadened restoration efforts with a 2010 target.

None of those deadlines were met. Experts say limited enforcement was one of the main reasons behind stalled progress, pointing to the EPA’s reluctance to use its regulatory authority against lagging states, particularly Pennsylvania, which for years has struggled to curb agricultural runoff.