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Chesapeake Bay Executive Council approves revised watershed agreement, elects Shapiro chair
Summary
The council approved revisions to the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, charged staff to formalize tribal partnership recommendations for 2026, and elected Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as the council’s next chair; federal and state leaders pledged funding and monitoring commitments to meet the agreement’s 2040 milestones.
The Chesapeake Bay Executive Council on the public portion of its 2025 meeting approved revisions to the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement and elected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as the council’s next chair.
Speakers at the National Aquarium in Baltimore emphasized that the rewritten agreement sets a 2040 milestone with intermediate checkpoints and a stronger emphasis on pairing predictive models with on-the-ground monitoring. An early summary read aloud by the chair listed six closed-session actions the council took, including receiving advisory-committee recommendations, reviewing an EPA Bay Program report, approving the watershed agreement revisions, adopting governance changes, charging staff to include tribes as formal partners with recommendations due in 2026, and electing Governor Shapiro as chair.
"This revised agreement does something that I think is particularly important. It places a great emphasis, an important emphasis on monitoring," said Virginia’s governor during his remarks, urging that models be paired with measurable outcomes to guide investment. EPA’s deputy representative told the council the administration will provide funding, technical expertise and data consistent with the agency’s authorities under the Clean Water Act (section 117) to support state and local partners.
The commission’s chair, Sarah Love, described the Chesapeake Bay Commission as the legislative voice in the partnership and said the revised agreement “underscores our vigorous commitment” to the core components of engaged communities, clean water, healthy landscapes and thriving habitats. She and other speakers repeatedly framed the changes as consensus-driven and focused on implementation speed and transparency.
The council’s action list, as stated publicly, also charges staff to develop recommendations to make tribes a formal and enduring partner in the Chesapeake Bay program; those recommendations are due in 2026. The move follows remarks acknowledging specific tribal representatives in the meeting room and characterizing tribal participation as essential to future planning.
Governor Shapiro, in accepting the gavel, said he would lead with a focus on delivering results and called for rapid implementation of the revised agreement’s framework. The meeting closed after a motion to adjourn that was moved by Governor Moore and seconded by Governor Meyer.
What happens next: council members said they will move to implement the revised agreement’s 2040 milestone and report publicly on interim checkpoints and outcomes; tribal partnership recommendations are due in 2026. The council did not publish a formal vote tally in the public remarks included in the meeting transcript.
