ANNAPOLIS, Md. - After 30 years of stubbornly slow progress toward restoring the health of the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers, federal agencies and watershed states in 2014 adopted a far-reaching strategy.

Their agreement formally expanded the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership to include three more states -- Delaware, New York and West Virginia -- so that the entirety of the 64,000-square-mile drainage basin would finally be covered by the pact. It incorporated enforceable pollution caps set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for nutrients and sediment. And it set goals for restoring oyster habitat, planting streamside buffers, improving fish passage, and a host of other actions. The partners imposed a voluntary 2025 deadline for getting the work done.

But the effort will fall far short of accomplishing many of the agreement's most critical targets.

Now, as 2025 approaches, scientists, policymakers and conservationists are grappling with what to do next. On July 1, the Bay Program released a draft report that proposes keeping, but updating, the 2014 agreement. Detailed changes would be made as early as the close of 2026.

Public feedback is invited on the 18-page report through Aug. 30 via [email protected]. A web page providing an overview of the draft, as well as relevant links, is available here.

The Bay Program expects to revise the draft before presenting it to the Chesapeake Executive Council, a panel of Bay state governors and other partnership leaders, for a vote in December.

A 29-member Beyond 2025 Steering Committee, primarily populated with state and federal environmental officials and scientists, has been working on the recommendations since last summer. Martha Shimkin, director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program Office and a Beyond 2025 co-chair, hailed the group's efforts after it finalized the version for public review during a three-hour meeting on June 27.

"This has been a lot of work, a lot of expertise and time commitment for more than a year," she said in thanking the committee members.

The draft incorporates input from committee members and hundreds of comments given in writing and at public meetings that focused on five themes: clean water, climate, healthy watersheds, people and shallow water habitats. The Eastern Research Group, a consulting firm, conducted an organizational review of the Bay Program.

Chuck Herrick, a retired environmental policy consultant who chairs the program's Stakeholders' Advisory Committee, said he was impressed by the partnership's willingness to look inward.

"I think 2025 could have [come and gone], and the partnership could have continued to move ahead without any momentous activity, without looking intentionally at the past and toward the future," he said. "It's good governance."

The 2014 Bay cleanup agreement is the fourth in the history of the 41-year Bay Program partnership. This time, the committee has recommended updating the 2014 pact rather than creating a new one. To undertake a new agreement from scratch would bog down the program in bureaucracy and distract from the direct work of cleaning up the Bay and its watershed, participants agreed.

The resulting report singles out two "overarching recommendations" for the Executive Council to consider in December:

1) affirming the leadership's commitment to meeting the 2014 agreement's goals, while directing staffers to pursue amendments aimed at its improvement; and 2) moving to "simplify and streamline" the Bay Program's structure to better meet the revised agreement's goals.

But even before the Beyond 2025 group had finished its draft, some environmentalists were pushing back. In late May, the Choose Clean Water Coalition issued its own recommendations, declaring that the Beyond 2025 group's suggested actions "do not go far and move quickly enough."

The Beyond 2025 report, for example, suggests a review and potential overhaul of the partnership's outcomes, with "every effort" being made to finalize the updated agreement by the end of 2026.

Kristin Reilly, the coalition's director, said she is concerned that the draft report lacks clear deadlines. Her group's letter calls for the Executive Council to launch a revision of the existing outcomes in an "open" process, driven by public input. Those suggested changes should be brought back to the council at its 2025 meeting, she said.

So far, some of the goals have been more attainable than others. Of the 31 outcomes, 17 have been achieved or are on track, according to a Bay Program review. Among them: restoring oyster reefs in 10 rivers, conserving an additional 2 million acres of land and improving fish passage.

But another dozen objectives are far from completion, it found. Those include some of the effort's most critical ecological goals, such as reducing nutrient pollution, creating wetlands, increasing streamside buffers and restoring underwater grasses.

Reilly and other conservation group leaders have pressed for the Executive Council "recommit" to the original 2014 outcomes. Funding remains at or near record levels for the cleanup effort. But most of the Executive Council members -- the governors of the six watershed states, mayor of the District of Columbia, chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and administrator of the EPA -- have been absent at the annual Executive Council meetings in recent years, sending representatives instead.

That's led some observers to question their commitment to the cause.

"I think the feeling overall is of uncertainty," Reilly said. "We're all hoping to see leadership from the states and federal agencies say that we're committed and continuing to move forward."

The slow pace of the cleanup has caused some fatigue among those in its orbit, said Joe Wood, a Virginia-based scientist with the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation. If council members affirm that they stand by the outcomes, it would help re-energize the effort, he suggested.

"I think there's a lot more that needs to happen," Wood added, "but that [recommitment] has to be first."