The Chesapeake Bay is our state’s greatest natural resource and efforts to restore the Bay to health involve many communities within its watershed.  I recently joined with Sen. Paul Sarbanes in announcing more than $1 million from the EPA to 27 Maryland communities to help clean up and improve the Bay’s watershed.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed includes parts of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and the District of Columbia.  This year, EPA awarded 68 Small Watershed Grants totally $2.6 million to community-based organizations in the seven jurisdictions that make up the watershed.

In the past nine years, the Small Watershed Grants Program has provided a total of $17.7 million in federal funds to support 544 projects throughout the watershed.  Since 1998, these grants have allowed recipients to leverage an additional $50.7 million from other funding sources in support of local community restoration efforts.

This year’s grants will protect or manage approximately 2,600 acres of critical fish and wildlife habitat, including wetlands, oyster reefs and underwater sea grasses.  Approximately 10,000 volunteers will participate in the projects, while 47,000 citizens will learn about the ecology of the Bay through outreach materials.

Some of the Maryland projects that received this year’s Small Watershed Grants include $25,000 to the Alliance for Community Education in Crofton, MD, to address the decline of Beaver Creek and $35,000 to help restore 1,300 acres of Spa Creek in Anne Arundel County. Another interesting project was a $50,000 grant to the Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management to increase urban tree planting as a way to reduce storm water runoff.   

Every year, the proposed projects are reviewed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and are selected based on criteria paralleling commitments set forth in the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement.  The agreement calls on Bay states and the District of Columbia to combine efforts with watershed organizations to restore local water quality and the living resources of the Bay watershed. 

These watershed grants are relatively small, but they have a significant impact on efforts to restore and improve the Bay.  Congress provides the funding, but it’s the individuals and communities closest to the Bay doing the actual work of restoring and protecting the Bay and its many tributaries.

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