by Dave Wilson (Wilson is the public outreach coordinator for the Maryland Coastal Bays Program)

More than anything else, one thing has made the Coastal Bays Program successful and helped to protect the back bays for the long-term: partnerships.

As a National Estuary Program, the Coastal Bays Program works by bringing local, state, and federal agencies to the table to help locals make decisions that are practical and do not put resource protection burdens on any one entity.

Since developers, farmers, fishermen and scientists finished the Coastal Bays Management Plan in 1999, Ocean City, Worcester County, the Maryland Departments of Natural Resources, Environment, and Agriculture, State Highway Administration, Cooperative Extension Service, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, US Geological Survey, US Coast Guard, and Virginia Institute of Marine Science have been working to implement the actions in the plan.

The groups meet every other month to discuss their progress on the activities which have specific application dates in the plan. The success of these groups in implementing their actions and the attention which they now give the coastal bays watershed is unprecedented. Dollars and work are flowing to the coastal bays like never before, and the best facet of this is that everyone is sharing. Especially valuable is the coordination between these groups when in many cases in the past there was none.

Together these agencies have helped permanently protect some 7,800 acres in the coastal bays watershed since 1999. They have conducted more than 100 boating safety classes, directly taken over 150 steps to improve water quality, undertaken more than 75 activities to protect wildlife and over 80 to enhance safety and resource protection during recreation and navigation.

Meanwhile the Coastal Bays staff has helped lead, coordinate and solidify these efforts to assure proper direction and functioning within the watershed -- collaborating on the Boaters Guide to the Coastal bays, size and creel brochures, water sampling, land preservation, seagrass work, horseshoe crab counts, boating and fishing surveys, Bayscapes projects, forest, wetland, and saltmarsh restoration, clam, oyster and waterfowl habitat projects, school programs, cleanups, dead-end canal improvements, enforcement upgrades, educational initiatives, Builders for the Bay, and fisheries management.

Through a standardized tracking and evaluation process, the Coastal Bays Program monitors all of these efforts to keep goals in sight and to re-direct funding or priorities when conservation warrants. Together, the individuals and agencies that make up the program function like one organism. Take out a liver and the entity ceases to operate properly.

Worcester County residents should shower praise on these partners which have acknowledged Maryland is more than a one-watershed state. Those that follow us will reap the benefits of these partnerships whose long-term vision is helping to insure the county’s economic and environmental prosperity.