The Environmental Protection Agency will hold its first Chesapeake Bay-related event of the year  next  Thursday, Feb. 25–a Web seminar updating the public on the EPA’s efforts to establish pollution limits for the bay.

The webinar will run from 10 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. and will cover the EPA’s latest plans to set maximum daily pollution limits in the Bay watershed, or what it calls Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL).

This webinar will likely review how the EPA intends to go about its second round of public forums, which it plans to hold before establishing the daily pollution limits by the end of this year. Anyone who wants in on the webinar can sign up here (you must do so ahead of time).

From November through mid-December of 2009, the EPA held forums to discuss and answer questions in regard to setting a TMDL for the Chesapeake Bay. Every week, the EPA answered questions from local businesses, citizens and spokespersons from numerous environmental groups.

The forums were to be the first of two rounds of meetings on pollution limits throughout the six-state (and District) watershed. One of the biggest issues of the meetings was what specific powers would the EPA hold as leverage to get states to cooperate, and that answer took some shape in a Dec. 29 letter sent to each of the states.

In the letter, the EPA lists a number of actions it may choose to take if states fall short on goals of pollution reduction, including increasing jurisdiction and oversight of pollutant permits, establishing more waste responsibilities for specific areas, and conditioning or redirecting EPA grants.

But the EPA also said it considers these precautions to be more of a “backstop,” and that it  fully expects compliance and cooperation from all of the states and the District.