MONTROSS -- Chesapeake Bay cleanup leaders attempted to breathe new life into their uphill battle yesterday by endorsing a broad plan to cut water pollution a year earlier than expected.

The group, on a motion made by Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant Jr., voted to recommend that the bay region's governors create a pollution budget for the 64,000-square-mile watershed by the end of 2010, not 2011 as once considered.

The governors will hold an annual bay policy meeting this fall or winter.

The decision was seen as a step forward for the cleanup effort, whose 24-year history is littered with missed deadlines and failed promises that have eroded the bay's health and standing as a source of economically important blue crabs and oysters.

"This is a change in policy," said Roy Hoagland, vice president for environmental protection and restoration for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. He said he welcomed the shift in direction.

Bryant's group, which included government representatives from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, met at Westmoreland State Park in Westmoreland County.

Its recommendation urges the governors of the six states in the bay's watershed, including West Virginia, Delaware and New York, to create a "total maximum daily load" for all forms of water pollution in thousands of miles of streams and rivers and all of the tidal Chesapeake Bay.

Those water bodies are on a list of "impaired waters" that the EPA says must be restored and protected from further pollution.

About 10,600 miles of streams, 94,000 acres of lakes and impoundments, and 2,200 square miles of the bay that are on the list are within Virginia's borders.

Bay state governors agreed to make improvements to get waterways off the dirty-waters list by 2010, but last year they conceded that they were far behind schedule.

An EPA inspector general concluded recently that it would take decades at the current rate of progress to meet the 2010 goal.

Bryant said the recommendation to enact a pollution budget by 2010 shows Virginia and its cleanup partners remain committed, despite setbacks.

"Governor Kaine said to me before this meeting that he is serious about Virginia's bay and river cleanup," Bryant said, referring to Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

Under the concept of total maximum daily load, computer models determine how much pollution a waterway can receive without impairing its health or harming fish and other living resources. Those numbers are then used to determine how much pollution wastewater-treatment plants and industry can discharge into streams.

The maximum daily load plan includes the complication of accounting for the pollution that runs off farmland, streets and lawns.

Nutrients from wastewater as well as fertilizers and animal manure from the lands' surface pose the main danger to the bay's health by triggering algae blooms that consume oxygen at the expense of fish and shellfish.

Contact Lawrence Latané III at (804) 333-3461 or llatane@timesdispatch.com.