PHOTO PROVIDED Dick Sodergren (left) of Bellefonte met with Congressman Glenn “GT” Thompson (center) during a March trip to Washington DC to discuss benefits of stream restoration programs in the upper Chesapeake Bay watershed. Amy Wolfe (right), who works for Trout Unlimited, accompanied Sodergren as they visited several Congressional offices.

By Trout Unlimited

Dick Sodergren of Bellefonte recently traveled to Washington DC, spending a day on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers and their staffs to tout the benefits of stream conservation efforts in Pennsylvania.

The trip was organized by Trout Unlimited, which is advocating for appropriate funding for conservation and stream restoration efforts in the upper Chesapeake Bay.

Amy Wolfe, who directs TU’s Pennsylvania Coldwater Habitat Restoration and Eastern Abandoned Mines programs, accompanied Sodergren, who is a member of TU’s Spring Creek chapter.

The pair met with U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Howard, and with the offices of U.S. Sens. Bob Casey and Pat Toomey and Rep. Matt Cartwright.

Sodergren owns property in the Kettle Creek watershed, a popular trout fishing destination. He is the president of the Kettle Creek Watershed Association, a group that has been a key partner with TU in restoration efforts in that area in Clinton, Tioga and Potter counties for two decades.

Funding from the Chesapeake Bay Program has been a good investment in the region, Sodergren said.

“Grants from the Chesapeake Bay Program are turned into local jobs,” Sodergren said. “We use the grants to hire the technical experts and local contractors, and to purchase the materials we need.

“All these people pay taxes and add to our local economy.”

The meetings in Washington had been on the calendar for a while, but now that sense of urgency really hit home with the release of the Trump Administration’s 2018 Budget. The budget proposes a significant cut to funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, including total elimination of the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Elimination of that $73 million program would severely limit the amount of coldwater habitat conservation TU can accomplish and stall progress on Bay cleanup efforts.

In Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Small Watershed Grants program has helped local communities restore trout streams, which helps downstream by contributing cold, clean water to the Chesapeake Bay.

Hundreds of thousands of rivers and streams comprise the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which has a footprint that covers 64,000 square miles. In their upper reaches, many of those rivers and streams hold trout, including brook trout, the only trout native to the East.

Yet much of that brook trout habitat is degraded, and the fish now are found in only a small percentage of the streams where they once existed.

Those trout help indicate the health of those watersheds, and that’s important for people, too. The rivers and streams in the Chesapeake Bay watershed provide drinking water for more than 13 million people from six states and Washington DC.

And there is the bay itself, which has an economic worth estimated at over $1 trillion. The Bay’s environmental challenges, which directly impact the important seafood, recreational fishing and tourism industries, are well documented. So is the progress that has been made in recent years – progress largely due to the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Here in the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Pennsylvania, Trout Unlimited has been using Chesapeake Bay Program funding to improve water quality on private and public lands for nearly 20 years. TU has assisted dozens of landowners, state agencies, and local volunteer and conservation organizations to reduce sediment pollution, restore stream side buffers, and improve fish populations and angling opportunities.

“Without funding support from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Program, our work will simply not be able to continue. It’s incredibly frustrating considering the great accomplishments that have been made, the solid partnerships we’ve built, and all the work that is still left to do,” commented TU’s Amy Wolfe.

“I find it hard to believe that after so much evidence of success that we could be going backwards to square one. It makes no sense, no economic or common sense whatsoever.”

In addition to its in-person efforts on Capitol Hill, Trout Unlimited recently has been urging its 160,000 members, along with other supporters, to stand up for the Chesapeake Bay Program by contacting their elected officials and to President Trump. The organization recently launched a new online Advocacy Center, which offers summaries of the Chesapeake Bay efforts and other TU campaigns.