Martha Shimkin, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, speaks at the Chesapeake Executive Council meeting in Annapolis on Dec. 10, 2024. Photo by Dave Harp/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
By Karl Blankenship
The Chesapeake Bay Journal
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, which coordinates regional efforts to restore the nation’s largest estuary, will be under new leadership in 2025 as it crafts another cleanup plan for the Bay.
Martha Shimkin, who has directed the office since December 2023, retired at the end of the year.
“It has been such an honor and privilege to lead this office and partnership,” Shimkin said in her December announcement. But, she said, it is time to “enjoy the ‘life’ part of the work-life balance.”
Lee McDonnell, who heads the office’s Science, Analysis and Implementation Branch, is serving as its interim director.
Shimkin has been with the office for four years, serving the first three as its deputy director before stepping up to the top position.
The past year has been a challenging one for the Bay Program partnership as state and federal agencies, nonprofit organizations and others have worked to decide what should happen with Chesapeake restoration efforts after 2025.
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That is the deadline for many restoration goals established in the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Agreement. It sets goals for a range of restoration activities, such as restoring oyster habitat, promoting environmental education and improving passages for migratory fish.
But many critical goals are far off track, including those for restoring wetlands, planting streamside forest buffers and expanding urban tree canopies. Next year will also mark the third time the Bay Program set and missed goals for reducing nutrient pollution, which has been a cornerstone of work to improve Bay water quality.
This year, Shimkin was co-leader of a “Beyond 2025” effort that conducted dozens of meetings and extensive outreach to determine what should come next. That resulted in a recommendation that the 2014 agreement be reviewed and updated next year, with all of its goals re-examined to determine whether they should be kept, dropped or updated with new objectives and timeframes.
The recommendation was endorsed at a Dec. 10 meeting in Annapolis of the Chesapeake Executive Council, which includes state governors, the EPA administrator, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, representing state legislatures.
With the first phase of the Beyond 2025 effort completed and its recommendations endorsed by the Bay’s top policymaking body, Shimkin said she was ready to leave the next phase to others.
“It’s good timing,” she said. “It’s been a lot to lead that and manage the overall office.”
The EPA Bay Program Office coordinates restoration work among its partners and provides grants to support their efforts. It also helps maintain key operations such as water quality monitoring and the development of sophisticated computer models.
Its budget has swelled from $90 million to $140 million in recent years, thanks largely to an influx of money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though that money will soon be exhausted.
Shimkin, who has more than 30 years of federal service, said she was pleased that in the past year strategies have been developed to increase the pace of restoring wetlands, planting forest buffers and expanding tree cover in urban areas. The Executive Council also approved the creation of a new Agricultural Advisory Committee, which is intended to help accelerate nutrient control efforts on farmland.
“It’s been the honor and a privilege of my life, of my career, to be able to be at this office, and I leave it with pride,” she said. “I’m never fully leaving. I’ll always have a little bit of my heart in this program.”