Pacemaker Fishing Forum

It's easy!! If you agree with the below letter, just email e-mail CBF’s Senior Naturalist, John Page Williams (jpwilliams@cbf.org) with the subject line:

Anglers for Clean Water.

Include your name and home town.

Thank you for your help!

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July XX, 2015

Governor Terry McAuliffe Chairman, Executive Council Patrick Henry Building 1111 East Broad Street, 3rd Floor Richmond, Virginia 23219

Dear Governor McAuliffe and Members of the Chesapeake Executive Council:

As you approach the 2017 mid-point assessment for the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, we the following Bay anglers write to express our concerns about disappointing overall progress toward the Blueprint’s pollution-reduction targets. Clean water and healthy fish habitat are what we live and breathe.

As members of the Chesapeake Executive Council, you have accepted responsibility for the progress--or lack of it--made toward the Blueprint goals. When the Council’s members signed the new Bay Watershed Agreement in 2014, you reaffirmed your commitment to the Blueprint’s water quality goals, including having programs and practices in place to achieve 60 percent of the nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment reductions by 2017 and 100 percent in place by 2025.

We celebrate the success of some states in some sectors to reduce polluted runoff; however, at our current pace, Bay-wide efforts to reduce total nitrogen will miss the 2017 target by more than 50 percent. We can and must accelerate our efforts in order to achieve a truly healthy Chesapeake.

Only your leadership can get the Blueprint back on track. If not, this latest attempt to restore water quality throughout the watershed will be relegated by history to the already too-long list of missed deadlines and cleanup failures.

We applaud the magnificent conservation efforts that many farmers have made over the past thirty years, but more of the Chesapeake watershed’s acreage is now in agricultural production (25 per cent) than any other land use. To reduce the impacts of intense food production, more farmers must participate in these clean water programs.

For the Chesapeake and its tributary creeks, streams, and rivers to regain true health, the region needs the Executive Council as a whole to exert its leadership. Thus we respectfully urge you, the Council’s members, to take strong action in support of the Blueprint, including investing more federal resources, particularly through USDA, to help Pennsylvania accelerate reductions. We ask not only for ourselves but for our children and all that will follow us onto the great waters of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. We want them to know the joys that we have known through fishing in this National Treasure.

Tight lines,
[John Doe, Williamsburg, VA]