EPA announces $206 million in Chesapeake Bay restorations funds

MARYLAND – $13 million of the EPA’s announced $206 million in Chesapeake Bay restoration funding will be moving through the Chesapeake Bay Trust.
President Jana Davis says that even when looking at the big picture, it all starts at a grass-roots level: “All of this great work that gets done to restore our watershed gets done by people…people who own land who want good projects to go on that land, leaders in communities. we’re all people, and so without the people part of it, the watershed’s just not gonna get restored.”

Allison Colden of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, says that with the funds they’re receiving from the EPA, they’ll be helping farmers to employ more environmentally friendly practices that will help improve water quality. She says,  “This includes things like installing trees along stream-sides, fencing livestock out of streams, as well as converting traditional crop into rotational grazing. All of these are highly effective, best management or restoration activities.”

The fight to preserve and restore the Chesapeake Bay has been going on for decades, but Davis says that this recent batch of funding is part of a steady trend of increasing support, from federal and state partners, but also from the general public: “I think that people are realizing that this trend is because people realize that these natural resources are really good for our economy, they’re good for the state, they’re good for our health.”

The Chesapeake Bay Trust and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are among the eighty-plus organizations that will benefit from this new allocation of funding.