A revised agreement to restore the Chesapeake Bay is speeding toward final passage, after a key committee rejected Maryland attempts to strengthen parts of the plan and voted Tuesday to forward it to bay-area leaders for their OK.

The agreement approved by the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Principals’ Staff Committee will chart the future for the multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to improve the bay. Final approval by bay leaders at their Dec. 2 meeting at the National Aquarium in Baltimore is considered a formality, since the principals’ staff committee includes representatives of the governors and other signatories of the agreement, including the federal government.

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The document unanimously approved Tuesday looks a bit different than the proposal that was released for public comment earlier this year. That plan drew considerable criticism for rolling deadlines and weak goals.

The revised document includes a variety of goals, from forest conservation to wetland creation, oyster restoration and pollution reduction. And it sets 2040 as the deadline for jurisdictions surrounding the bay to meet those goals, instead of the earlier document’s multiple deadlines between 2030 and 2040, depending on the goal.

Maryland officials had pushed for a 2035 deadline for the plan, but only Virginia supported that proposal when it was brought to a vote.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz, who chairs the principals’ committee, stressed Tuesday that the bay states should be sure to avoid dragging their feet, with 15 years to achieve their goals.

“We’re really bullish, and we believe in the work of all of our jurisdictions, that we’re still going to meet a lot of these goals before that 2040 timeline,” Kurtz said. “I don’t think we should – in any way – say we should stretch things out for the sake of getting to 2040. And I hope that that is the way that everyone else reads it, as well.”

It wasn’t Maryland’s only failed attempt to make the revised bay agreement more aggressive.

Maryland also proposed language that would have committed all of the bay states to reduce stubborn nutrient and sediment pollution by 2035, in accordance with a “pollution diet” set for the bay by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama. But Maryland couldn’t get support from any other state.

“Our language came out of an understanding that states are in very different places, but we wanted to demonstrate to the public the commitment,” Kurtz said.

The agreement is signed by Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and West Virginia. It is also signed by federal agencies including the EPA and the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which represents state legislators in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

EPA representatives were on hand Tuesday despite the ongoing federal government shutdown, and cast a vote to approve revised agreement – but other federal agencies were absent.

Maryland is one of the states that is on-track to meet its nutrient and sediment reduction goals as soon as this year. But several other states are not, including Pennsylvania.

Overall, the bay states were only 59% of the way toward their goal of reducing nitrogen pollution, though they met to goal for sediment and were 92% of the way there for phosphorus pollution.

But the gains in the bay haven’t been as significant as once hoped. Some 70.6% of the bay and its tributaries do not meet water quality standards, compared to 73.5% in the late 1980s.

Continued population growth and climate change have made the bay states’ efforts more challenging. States have also struggled to contain “non-point” pollution, which comes from more diffuse sources of runoff, such as farm fields and urban streets, as opposed to the discharge pipes for industrial facilities or sewage plants.

In the revised agreement, the bay states agreed to “continue to accelerate completion of all interim water quality planning targets” associated with the pollution diet from EPA, which is called the Total Maximum Daily Load.

The states agreed to update the target figures for nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment by Dec. 31, 2030, using an anticipated computer modeling update from the Chesapeake Bay Program.

The agreement states that the bay states will need to meet the new targets by 2040, and demonstrate their success using not only computer modeling, but water quality monitoring data from the bay.

Virginia Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources Stefanie Taillon said officials in the commonwealth supported a 2035 deadline for the agreement, except with regard to nutrient and sediment pollution.

“That is a very different and unique outcome as compared to the rest of the agreement,” Taillon said. “Each jurisdiction, each partner, is at a very different timeline in terms of reaching that outcome.”

During the public comment period, critics argued that the agreement did not contain sufficiently aggressive measures to control pollution and improve habitats. That document did not include a specific mention of the TMDL, and critics argued that it walked back other conservation goals so that they would be easier for the states to achieve.

The Principal’s Staff Committee also voted on whether the revised document should include a mention of waterbird conservation. Several states voted no, including Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware – as did the EPA.

“From Virginia’s perspective, it wasn’t about, ‘Should waterbirds be in the agreement or not?’ It was how they were included,” Taillon said.

She said the draft released for public comment did not include a “fully fleshed-out, measurable” target for waterbirds, so her state favored a planning period to develop the waterbirds outcome with more specificity.

Ultimately, the states agreed to mention waterbirds in the section committing the states to restore or create at least 3,000 acres and enhance 15,000 acres of both tidal and non-tidal wetlands by 2040. The states should focus “on habitats that support populations of waterbirds and represent healthy wetlands across the watershed,” according to Tuesday’s version of the document. Virginia supports this move, Taillon said.

“While everybody might not have gotten everything that they would have wanted to put in the agreement, that’s kind of the beauty of a consensus-driven process, and a partnership,” Kurtz said Tuesday.

After the committee approved the agreement, Kurtz and other officials broke into applause.

“The sheer amount of work that went into this is staggering, and is very, very much appreciated,” Kurtz said.

This story was originally produced by Maryland Matters, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Pennsylvania Capital-Star, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.