Nicholas A. “Nick” DiPasquale, who as director of the Chesapeake Bay Program oversaw creation of the agreement that guides today’s restoration efforts and sought to build broader support for that work, died Nov. 24 after a long battle with cancer. He was 71.

Born in Rochester, NY, on Nov. 7, 1951, DiPasquale became committed to environmental work after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a teen. He later spent three decades working on environmental issues with state agencies, nonprofits and as a private consultant before becoming head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office in 2011. There, he worked with states and other partners to craft the expansive 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which serves as the guiding vision for today’s Bay work, from water quality improvement to oyster restoration to land protection.

“The Chesapeake community has lost an incredible voice and advocate,” said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, which represents nearly 300 groups in the region. “Throughout his entire career, Nick possessed an unflappable commitment to clean water and protecting our most precious natural resources.” She praised his “uncanny ability to bridge divides and build consensus, which played a critical role in moving restoration efforts forward for clean water in our region.”

Nick DiPasquale, retired head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program office, sits with his companion, Mac, along the waterfront in Chestertown, MD, in 2021. Dave Harp photo.

He served as Bay Program director for six and a half years before retiring at the end of 2017. His tenure was the second longest of any director in the Bay Program’s 40-year history. It coincided with ramped-up efforts to reduce nutrient pollution to the estuary, and he won praise from many for helping to refocus the state-federal partnership on issues related to fish and other living resources, habitat protection and stream health.

For several previous years, the Bay effort had been mostly focused on Chesapeake water quality and setting nutrient pollution reduction goals in the Bay’s total maximum daily load or “pollution diet.” The intense focus on nutrient reductions during development of the TMDL, which was implemented in 2010, caused some agencies and organizations that were focused on other issues to drift away from participating in the Bay Program.

Nick DiPasquale, then director of the U.S. EPA Chesapeake Bay Program office, speaks at Fletcher’s Cove in Washington, DC, in 2015. Jenna Valente/Chesapeake Bay Program

DiPasquale helped change that through the 2014 agreement, which he considered the highlight of his Bay career. That agreement contains objectives for restoring oysters, improving habitat for brook trout and black ducks, protecting land, expanding citizen stewardship and a host of other activities. It reflected his view that restoring the Bay is about more than cleaning its water. It laid out a vision for the future — and it increased the involvement of agencies and organizations in the Bay effort, including some that had never previously worked on Chesapeake issues.

“When it came to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, Nick really saw the forest for the trees,” said Joel Dunn, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy. “Nick directed the Chesapeake Bay Program at a time when there was a particularly intense focus on the TMDLs, and he helped expand this focus to encompass other key areas like land management and conservation that also impact the health of the Bay watershed.”

Dunn praised DiPasquale for embracing new technologies to tackle environmental problems, including a new multi-year effort that secured imagery of the entire Bay watershed at one-square meter resolution to better identify where conservation work would be most effective and prioritize land for protection. “Although we have much work still before us, Nick’s leadership in his career and in his volunteerism resulted in major gains for the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort,” he said.

DiPasquale sought to expand the geographic reach of Bay efforts. The 2014 agreement was the fourth Bay restoration strategy to be signed by state governors and the EPA administrator, but it was the first to also include the upstream states of Delaware, New York and West Virginia. He also worked to increase the role of watershed residents by enlisting more people in monitoring efforts that could help inform decision making. He also advocated for greater outreach to underserved communities and to ensure they were benefitting from Bay-related work.

Nick DiPasquale, then director of the U.S. EPA Chesapeake Bay Program office, attends the Chesapeake Executive Council meeting in 2015. Steve Droter/Chesapeake Bay Program

Within the Bay Program, DiPasquale had to balance the longstanding tensions between the EPA, which often seeks to be more assertive in Bay Program oversight, and state partners. In meetings, he would present himself as representing the Bay Program, not the EPA.

“This, over the years, has been difficult to explain to the EPA — that while they pay my salary, I really work for the partnership and I have a responsibility to act on decisions that the partnership makes,” DiPasquale said in an interview with the Bay Journal when he retired.

More than once, this perspective led to conflicts with higher-ups in the agency. In his final months on the job, he became embroiled in a controversy with political appointees of the Trump administration over their abrupt decision to retract a grant that helped support the Bay Journal. He ultimately filed a complaint with the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, saying the action violated agency grant regulations. In an interview with Energy & Environment News shortly after his retirement, DiPasquale said the decision was “totally ideologically driven.” Among mounting criticism, the EPA reversed the decision.

DiPasquale was recognized with numerous awards, including being named Admiral of the Chesapeake by the governor of Maryland and receiving the 2018 Clean Water Champion award from the Choose Clean Water Coalition.

DiPasquale also was valued as a mentor for those getting started in environmental fields. “I had the pleasure of working with Nick early in my career, and I will personally remember his staunch support for young professionals making their way through our field,” said Reilly of Choose Clean Water. “The example he set of leadership and collaboration is one that should serve as an example to us all.”

“As we look to the future of Bay restoration efforts, we owe a debt of gratitude to the foundation Nick has laid and are well-served to follow in his footsteps as we work to leave a legacy of clean water to future generations,” she said.

After retirement, DiPasquale settled in Chestertown, MD, and continued his advocacy for the environment by serving on a variety of boards and through speaking engagements. He could be found navigating area waterways in his kayak with his wife, Becky.

Along with Becky, he is survived by his daughter, Laura DiPasquale, and her husband and children, Eric, Alex and Addie Zupan; his sister, her husband and their daughter, MaryEllen, Craig and Alexandria Colling; his brother and his two children, Jim, Danielle and Benjamin DiPasquale; and his stepdaughter, her husband and children, Jess, Simon, Caroline and Emily Nichols.

By Karl Blankenship

Not long after Ann Swanson began working to restore the Chesapeake Bay, she found herself speaking about it to a group of grade school students. One youngster raised his hand and asked her, “What are you going to do when the Bay is saved? What’s your next job?”

Ann Swanson (photo by Dave Harp)

Swanson recalls that question with a wry smile. She never got another job. She’s been laboring for nearly four decades to clean up and revitalize the ailing estuary. On Nov. 21, she retired after almost 35 years as executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, the tri-state legislative advisory body that’s been a key player in the long-running regional effort.

The Bay still hasn’t been saved and, in a sense, it never will be. But that it hasn’t been for want of trying, especially on her part.

“She’s had the spirit, the brainpower, the drive to keep pressing forward on all fronts,” said John Griffin, a former Maryland Natural Resources secretary and gubernatorial aide who’s known and worked with Swanson most of those years.

She’s been at it since 1983, first as a grassroots coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, then at the Bay Commission, where she was hired five years later.

The 21-member commission, representing the legislatures of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, has been a signatory of every Bay restoration agreement — along with governors and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrators. Swanson has been an adviser to those lawmakers and an advocate for the dozens of Bay-related bills and funding measures they’ve sponsored.

‘Leader of the band’

“She’s been really the leader of the band for decades,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). He called her “the conductor … the maestro” who’s kept members focused on what’s needed.

Swanson characteristically deflects credit to the commission members themselves and to her staff. But state Sen. Sarah Elfreth (D-Anne Arundel), the commission’s current chair said, “she really guides a lot of our work,” advising them on the most critical issues and what measures are most likely to succeed.

The Bay Commission post has been her dream job, Swanson said. It meant working collaboratively across state and party lines to pass legislation and get funding to improve the health of the Bay, its rivers and streams, and its living resources. “I always wanted to work in conservation,” she said. “I wanted to work at the regional scale.”

But for some serendipitous networking, Swanson might have wound up elsewhere. She grew up on Long Island in New York and attended the University of Vermont, majoring in wildlife biology. She also earned a master’s degree in environmental studies at Yale University. Her first job was as assistant state naturalist in Vermont.

It was an internship with the National Wildlife Federation that brought her to the Bay region. She got it with a little help from her physician father, who — worried about her job prospects — talked her up to a federation executive he met on a cruise. One of her mentors at the federation later urged her to apply for a job with the Bay Foundation.

Barely a month into her job with the foundation, she was present at the 1983 conference — sponsored by the Bay Commission — where the first formal agreement was signed by federal and state leaders pledging to work together to restore the Chesapeake and created the state-federal Bay Program. Remembering it today still moves her.

“It was 1,000 people who deeply cared. And it was an issue that had become so compelling and so politically important that everyone wanted to be in the room.”

Back then, she and many others thought that kind of spirit could save the Bay in a decade or so. Within a few years, Maryland and Virginia passed laws to curb sediment pollution from construction sites, and those two states and Pennsylvania each banned the use of phosphate detergents. Maryland and Virginia passed laws limiting waterfront development. Pennsylvania adopted a law requiring farmers to manage fertilizer applications.

Broker of new ideas

The Bay Commission, Swanson said, “has played a critical role in in the trajectory of the whole Bay program because we’ve often been the broker of either a new idea or a … solution.”

In the mid-1990s, amid tensions between Maryland and Virginia over the economically important blue crab fishery, the commission formed a bistate advisory committee that brought together legislators, watermen, scientists and fishery managers to hash out their differences. Swanson chaired a workgroup of scientists and economists that over eight years helped forge an agreement between the states to rely on science to manage crabs as a single fishery across state lines.

With Swanson organizing meetings and writing up testimony and talking points, the commission has also advocated, often successfully, for maintaining and even increasing federal funding for the Bay.

“Ann has been front and center in that effort,” Van Hollen said, “and that includes everything from the annual funding for the EPA for the Bay Program to our efforts to expand support from the agricultural conservation programs.”

Van Hollen, who’s worked with Swanson both in the Maryland legislature and in Congress, said she has a rare ability to distill and communicate the complexities of Bay issues. “She gets the science, she gets the policy and she gets the politics. That’s just an invaluable combination.”

She’s also helped the commission work without rancor. It has both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, but they’ve operated collegially. While partisan differences have grown sharper in state legislatures, they have not carried over to commission meetings.

Politics absent

“It’s probably the most bipartisan or nonpartisan organization that I’ve ever been involved with,” said Pennsylvania Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican commission member. “Politics doesn’t come up.”

Elfreth, a Democrat, credits Swanson with helping to maintain that culture. She also views her as a mentor. “There’s not been nearly enough women on the commission,” Elfreth said. While their numbers have grown, she noted that at times in the past, “Ann has been the only female voice in the room.” Seeing Swanson among the Bay restoration leadership, she said, has “meant a lot to me as a young woman starting off in my political career.”

Those who think the Bay cleanup effort has gone soft or astray are less impressed with the commission or Swanson’s leadership. Gerald Winegrad, a former Maryland state senator who served on the commission when Swanson was hired, said he hasn’t seen it take any bold or controversial stances in recent years.

“Show me an organization that’s done it better,” Swanson countered. The commission “always has to consider the science, consider the appropriate policy and then consider the do-able,” she continued. “The commission has never worked on policy that’s pablum. They haven’t. They’ve always pushed for something that was meaningful.”

Initiatives advocated by the commission haven’t always been embraced by all three states. It took Pennsylvania lawmakers 11 years to pass limits on lawn fertilizer similar to the bills that sailed through Maryland’s and Virginia’s legislatures in 2011.

“That had to be a high point,” Yaw said of the fertilizer vote earlier this year. “It’s something that she was really frustrated by.” He credited the bill’s ultimate passage to Swanson’s persistence, noting that she had spent “a ton of time” in the past year visiting Harrisburg to buttonhole legislators.

She wasn’t there just for the fertilizer bill, but also for bigger quarry. She was urging lawmakers to take advantage of a big influx of federal COVID relief funds and direct some of it toward cleaning up the state’s rivers and streams — and, by extension, the Bay. In June, they approved using $220 million to create a Clean Streams Fund, with most of it slated to help farmers control nutrient– and sediment-laden runoff. The vote broke a years-long stalemate over getting the legislature to financially boost the state’s lagging Bay cleanup efforts.

Elusive goals

In the years since Swanson started at the commission, Bay water quality has improved — just not enough. The amounts of water-fouling nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment reaching it have declined over the decades, yet still only about 30% of the Bay and its tidal rivers meet water quality standards.

“The conservation, the protection of the Chesapeake Bay has proved far more difficult and much more of a long reach than I ever expected,” she said.

Federal and state leaders recently acknowledged that many goals and outcomes pledged in the latest Bay restoration agreement, signed in 2014 by state and federal leaders, will not be met by their 2025 target date. There’s talk of extending the deadline or rethinking goals.

For Swanson, that’s no reason to let up now.

“We have more money on the table than we’ve ever had,” she said, referring to the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled to states nationwide in the federal infrastructure and inflation reduction bills. “If we can just harness that, and make sure that we spend the money smartly, and listen to our science and use our targeting tools, we actually have the ability to leapfrog in terms of progress.”

She’s leaving that for others now. Asked how she felt about that, she looked away, and her voice thickened.

“I feel like my job … I didn’t finish. However, I also feel that the time is right. Because there’s got to be a newer younger generation coming up. I’ve been at this job 35 years, and it’s done.”

She’ll be 65 in December. Her husband, Eric, retired five years ago and has taken a few trips without her because her work prevented her from going. Her mother is 93 and needs her care.

“I have gardens to grow, I have meals to cook, I have the world to see,” she added. “There’s got to be time in the day for friends. … And so, it’s just the right time.”

Elfreth said the commission hopes to have a new executive director by early next year. But she also hopes that Swanson will be willing to take calls to share her “treasure trove” of knowledge about Bay issues.

In her farewell address Oct. 11 to the governors and EPA administrator on the Chesapeake Executive Council, Swanson presented a bar graph showing how nitrogen reaching the Bayhad declined about a third since the 1980s, when she began her career. Over the same time, the watershed’s population grew by half, increasing the amount of polluted runoff and decreasing forests and wildlife habitat.

“In my really low days, I would say to my husband, ‘You know what my tombstone is going to say? It’s going to say, ‘she died holding the line.’ But what I want to point out is that I came here in ’83 and the line was here,’’ she said pointing to the taller bar on the graph. “So my tombstone will not be, ‘She died holding the line,’ because you have brought [the line] down.”

“But,” she concluded, “you need to do more.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Maryland’s environmental chief vowed to make immediate reforms at his agency as he faced sharp questions Jan. 18 from state lawmakers frustrated with its performance over the past year.

Members of the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee pressed Ben Grumbles for answers on the state’s shortage of drinking-water system inspectors; the lack of penalties handed down to chicken farms that run afoul of pollution controls; the agency’s failure last fall to warn of a sewage spill before more than two dozen people fell ill from eating contaminated oysters; and two separate instances in which major pollution violations went unnoticed until watchdog groups gathered evidence and reported their findings to the state.

Democratic Sen. Paul Pinsky, the committee’s chair, said the revelations suggest a pattern of disregard for the public’s wellbeing on par with the federal Food and Drug Administration’s oversight failures that contributed to the nationwide opioid epidemic.

“One of the issues that comes out consistently is it wasn’t an issue of the FDA controlling Big Pharma but Big Pharma controlling the FDA,” Pinsky said. In Maryland’s case, he said he wants to make sure that the Department of the Environment is “controlling the sector that they are supposed to protect rather than that sector controlling them.”

Grumbles pledged to push forward several changes, including hiring dozens of new staff members in the Water Supply Program and significantly increasing the number of inspections conducted at chicken farms this year.

The MDE secretary also took personal blame for the agency’s belated order in November to shut down shellfish harvesting in St. George Creek in St. Mary’s County after a sewage spill. The local water and sewer utility followed protocol by immediately reporting the overflow of more than 25,000 gallons of diluted but untreated sewage, officials say. But the MDE failed to formally act on the information for more than two weeks.

In the meantime, a St. Mary’s oyster farm had unwittingly harvested more than 7,000 oysters from its leased bottom in the creek and sold them. As a result, 27 people in Virginia reported getting sick after eating the raw oysters.

“I accept responsibility for a breakdown, the failure in communication,” Grumbles said. “Our enforcement people were aware of and noted the spill, the infrastructure leakage problem. It didn’t get properly communicated to the hard-working folks who run our Shellfish Sanitation Program.”

The agency has since taken steps to make sure that a similar mistake doesn’t happen again, he added.

A common refrain during the nearly two-hour hearing was that the agency’s enforcement divisions are understaffed and overworked.

A consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted an analysis of the MDE’s workload, finding that its drinking water inspectors conduct approximately 240 inspections per year, nearly four times as many as their peers typically do in other states. At the time of the analysis, there were 27 vacancies out of a staff of 71 full-time positions.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh contended that the lack of staff has contributed to another problem: a decline in the number of certified operators at the state’s 3,300 public drinking water suppliers. The analysis, conducted by the business consulting firm CADMUS, found that 72% of water systems had a certified operator in 2020, down from 84% in 2015.

The state was supposed to submit its response — which the EPA called a “resource investment plan” — in October. But Frosh said it has failed to do so, leaving the public in the dark about what measures the state agency intends to take. Grumbles later told the committee that the MDE has turned in “phase one” of the plan and is currently working on the second.

The situation is so dire that the state risks being ceding responsibility of its drinking water program to the federal government and losing the $21 million in federal contributions toward running the program, CADMUS warned.

“This is an embarrassment to the state,” Sen. Clarence Lam, a Howard County Democrat, said. “It’s like the department is barreling down the highway at full speed with four flat tires.”

Grumbles said that much of the decrease in staffing was caused by a “silver tsunami” of retirements during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The MDE has since brought the program’s staffing level up to 68 people, with the goal of reaching 102 in the coming months. CADMUS recommended 126.

A similar staffing shortage plagues the agency’s oversight of the Eastern Shore’s chicken industry, critics say. An Environmental Integrity Project report last year found that state inspectors are visiting fewer farms than they once did, falling from an average of 218 a year from 2013 through 2017 to 134 per year from 2018 through 2020, with that decrease predating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Grumbles promised to add two inspectors to the current staff of three and increase the number of inspections by 50%, drawing praise from the group that authored the report.

“This is good news for the Chesapeake Bay that MDE will be increasing its inspection staff and has pledged to significantly boost its inspections of the poultry industry,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. Schaeffer, the former director of civil enforcement at EPA, also testified during the hearing. “However, more needs to be done,” he added, “including more routine penalties for chronic violations of pollution control laws to protect waterways and public health.”

One of the ways that MDE will accomplish the increase in inspections will be to conduct “video inspections,” Grumbles said. Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat, questioned whether such a system would work, saying that farmers could simply “show what they want to show” with their cameras. Grumbles responded that MDE staff would direct farmers in real time on what to shoot.

Senators also sought explanations for why environmental groups — and not MDE inspectors — brought to light recent pollution violations at a pair of Baltimore sewage treatment plants and at a chicken-rendering facility in Dorchester County. “We have enough humility to recognize that we’re not the only eyes and ears in the field,” Grumbles told the committee.

But his detailed defense of his agency’s recent actions rang hollow with at least one lawmaker.

“At the end of the day when we pass laws, it’s the law-enforcement entity whose responsibility it is to enforce those laws,” said Sen. Mary Washington, a Baltimore City Democrat. “We continue to hear these statements that seem to suggest that you have intention, that you’re making best efforts and maybe you accept responsibility. But it’s only after getting caught.”

by Jeremy Cox