EPA Oversight of Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) and Milestones in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

EPA Oversight - EPA Evaluations -  Program Contacts

EPA Oversight

EPA's goal is for the Bay jurisdictions to successfully implement their Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) and two-year milestones to achieve the necessary nutrient and sediment reductions. As it has done since the release of the Bay TMDL, EPA will continue to commit staff, contractual, and funding resources to support the implementation of the Bay jurisdictions’ Phase III WIPs and two-year milestones. This support includes evaluation of the most-effective practices and locations, annual WIP assistance funding to address priority implementation needs, evaluation of Bay jurisdictions’ implementation capacity under various staffing, funding, regulatory and programmatic scenarios, local planning outreach, legislative and regulatory gap analysis, and monitoring trend analyses. In addition, EPA will continue to work with federal partners to provide leadership and coordinate with the Bay jurisdictions on WIP and two-year milestone implementation to reduce pollutants from federal lands.

EPA will continue its commitment to track annual progress and release biennial evaluations of the Bay jurisdiction’s progress and make those results available to the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) partnership and the public. EPA provided a specific list of assistance actions in each Bay jurisdiction’s 2019 final Phase III WIP evaluation as part of the agency’s role to help Bay jurisdictions improve accountability to the CBP partnership and the public in meeting the 2025 water quality goals.

EPA will continue to work with the Bay jurisdictions to identify assistance needs and will evaluate resource availability to support Bay jurisdictions in achieving the 2025 goals.

In addition, EPA is prepared to use its discretion to take federal actions, if it is appropriate to do so, to help the jurisdictions achieve their pollutant reduction targets. Federal actions can be taken at any time. Potential actions could include:

• Expand National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit coverage to unregulated sources.
• Expand EPA oversight review of state-issued NPDES permits and EPA objection to inadequate permits.
• Require new improvement offsets for new or increasing loadings.
• Establish finer-scale wasteload allocations and load allocations in the Chesapeake Bay TMDL.
• Require additional reductions of loadings from point sources.
• Increase and target federal enforcement and compliance assurance, including both air and water sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment.
• Condition or redirect EPA grants.
• Federally promulgate local nutrient water quality standards (WQS).

For more information on the potential actions and assistance, please visit:

• Section 7 of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL document
• EPA’s December 29, 2009 letter to the PSC on the Chesapeake Bay Accountability Framework and Federal Actions (pdf)

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