Early in December 2010, press reports indicated that legislators, especially in the Senate, were seeking to gather support for several water quality bills that could be considered during the post-election, lame duck session of the 111 th Congress, possibly packaged with others dealing with public lands and wildlife protection. These discussions resulted in a comprehensive bill, titled "America's Great Outdoors Act of 2010," that was introduced in the Senate on December 17 ( S.Amdt. 4845 to S. 303 ). The water quality measures were found in Division J, Title CII (Subtitles A-I) and Title CII (Subtitle A) of S.Amdt. 4845 . This report describes water quality bills that were included in the package. All but one of the bills discussed below would have amended the Clean Water Act (CWA, 33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq. ), and all had been approved and reported by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Similar House bills had been introduced for all but one of the Senate measures, and the House had passed two of them. With the exception of legislation that focused on Chesapeake Bay ( S. 1816 , discussed below), the individual bills were not considered to be controversial, although some Members criticized the expansive scope and cost of the entire omnibus bill. Most of the individual bills would either have reauthorized and in some cases modified existing CWA provisions that address water quality concerns in specified geographic areas, or they would have established similar provisions for other regions or watersheds. As included in S.Amdt. 4845 , most of the bills were little changed from the Senate Environment Committee-approved versions, while three reflected more substantive modifications (bills dealing with the Great Lakes, Long Island Sound, and San Francisco Bay). The 111 th Congress adjourned sine die on December 22 without taking up either the omnibus bill or individual measures that were included in S.Amdt. 4845 . Whether the 112 th Congress will consider some or all of these bills is unknown for now. The CWA is the principal federal law that deals with polluting activity in the nation's surface streams, lakes, estuaries, and coastal waters. Enacted basically in its current form in 1972 (P.L. 92-500), the law established broad water quality restoration objectives for the nation's waters. The objectives were accompanied by statutory goals to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters of the United States by 1985 and to attain, wherever possible, waters deemed "fishable and swimmable" by 1983. Programs at the federal level are administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); state and local governments have major day-to-day responsibilities to implement CWA programs through standard-setting, permitting, and enforcement. Considerable progress towards the goals of the act has been made, but long-standing problems persist and new problems have emerged. The last major amendments to the law were the Water Quality Act of 1987 ( P.L. 100-4 ), the most comprehensive amendments since 1972. Subsequently, congressional committees conducted oversight on the law, and Congress enacted bills addressing a number of regional water quality concerns. The 111 th Congress bills included in American's Great Outdoors Act of 2010 ( S.Amdt. 4845 ) addressed issues for these geographic-specific areas and CWA programs: Estuaries under the CWA's National Estuary Program, Chesapeake Bay, Columbia River Basin, Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, Lake Tahoe, Long Island Sound, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, and Monitoring water quality of coastal recreation waters. Estuaries are areas where rivers meet the sea and where fresh and salt water mix. They are critical to the health of coastal environments. They serve as important habitat for fish and wildlife, provide wetland plants and soils that trap pollutants and temper storm surges, and provide tangible, direct economic benefits to regions and the nation. Many, however, are threatened or degraded by overuse of resources and human development. In response to concerns about conditions of the nation's coastal estuaries, the 1987 CWA amendments established the National Estuary Program (NEP) in Section 320 of the act. The NEP is a program to promote comprehensive planning efforts to protect nationally significant estuaries that are threatened by pollution, development, and overuse. Once approved by EPA, local stakeholders can receive financial and technical assistance to develop and implement a comprehensive conservation management plan that addresses factors that contribute to the estuary's degradation. To date, EPA has approved 28 estuaries for participation in the program. Since 1987, Congress has amended Section 320 to reauthorize funding and in several cases to identify estuaries to be given priority consideration under the program. Authorization of Section 320 appropriations expired at the end of FY2010. In April 2010, the House passed H.R. 4715 , the Clean Estuaries Act, to reauthorize assistance through FY2016 and to increase the authorization from $35 million annually to $50 million annually to encourage EPA to expand the number of estuaries included in the program. Further, H.R. 4715 would have added several requirements in the development of comprehensive management plans, such as addressing the impacts of climate change, and would have required periodic update of the plan and evaluation and approval by EPA. Under the House-passed bill, if the EPA review were to find the plan deficient, EPA could reduce grant funding until the plan was revised. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved an amended version of H.R. 4715 in June ( S.Rept. 111-293 ). As reported, the bill would have increased authorization of appropriations to $75 million per year and would have required updates and evaluations every five years, rather than every four years as in the House-passed version. In S.Amdt. 4845 , National Estuary Program provisions were included in Division J, Title CII, Subtitle C. The provisions were essentially the same as in the bill as approved by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Modifications were included to clarify EPA procedures for reviewing and determining completeness of a comprehensive management plan. The provisions of S.Amdt. 4845 would have authorized appropriations of assistance for NEP estuaries for six years (through FY2017) at $75 million per year. The bill with the greatest potential for controversy is S. 1816 , the Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009. It would revise CWA Section 117, which addresses restoration of Chesapeake Bay's water quality. Because of this stand-alone CWA provision, Chesapeake Bay is not included in the NEP. Despite several decades' of activity by governments, the private sector, and the general public, efforts to improve and protect the Chesapeake Bay watershed have been insufficient to meet restoration goals. Although some specific indicators of bay health have improved slightly or remained steady (such as blue crabs and underwater bay grasses), others remain at low levels of improvement, especially water quality. Overall, the bay and its tributaries remain in poor health, with polluted water, reduced populations of fish and shellfish, and degraded habitat and resources. In May 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13508 that declared the bay a "national treasure" and charged the federal government with assuming a strong leadership role in restoring the bay. The executive order established a Federal Leadership Committee for the Chesapeake Bay to develop and implement a new strategy for protecting and restoring the Chesapeake Basin that would build on and accelerate existing programs like those under CWA Section 117. A central feature of the overall strategy is EPA's pledge to establish a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for Chesapeake Bay. Section 303 of the CWA requires states to identify waters that are impaired by pollution, even after application of pollution controls. For those waters, states must establish a TMDL to ensure that water quality standards can be attained. A TMDL is essentially a pollution budget, or a quantitative estimate of what it takes to achieve standards, setting the maximum amount of pollution that a water body can receive without violating standards. If a state fails to do this, EPA is required to make its own TMDL determination for the state. Throughout the United States—including the Chesapeake Bay watershed—more than 20,000 waterways are known to be violating applicable water quality standards, and thus requiring development of a TMDL. Lawsuits have been brought to pressure EPA and states to develop TMDLs; under a consent decree in one such lawsuit, EPA must establish a Chesapeake Bay TMDL by no later than May 1, 2011, with a goal of having TMDL implementation measures in place by 2025. The Chesapeake Bay TMDL will be the geographically largest single TMDL developed to date. It will address all segments of the bay and its tidal tributaries that are impaired from discharges of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment, and the TMDL will allocate needed reductions of these pollutants to all jurisdictions in the 64,000-square-mile watershed. Detailed plans identifying specific reductions will be developed by the bay states in Watershed Implementation Plans. Environmental activists are pleased that the federal government is now asserting a leadership role to restore the bay and are supporting legislation that would codify procedural requirements and deadlines for the bay TMDL and authorize grants and other assistance for implementing required measures. S. 1816 proposed to do so. As reported, the bill generally sought to codify 2025 as a deadline for implementing restoration actions throughout the Chesapeake Basin and would have given EPA explicit backup authority to develop measures to restore the watershed, if states fail to do so. The legislation would have authorized significant financial resources, totaling $2.26 billion over six years, to assist in implementing programs, projects, and measures for restoration of the Chesapeake Basin watershed.