Chesapeake Bay Action Plan

(Posted by Gerald Winegrad). The recent deluges leading to massive stormwater runoff into the Chesapeake Bay may cause great damage to an already seriously impaired system. We previously have discussed in this spot the huge flows of Bay-choking nutrients and sediment from farms each time it rains. Now, we will devote discussions to the pollution flowing from developed lands including huge amounts of nutrients, sediment, and toxic chemicals.

Bay Watershed Forest Cover, Chesapeake Bay Program

Our Senior Scientists and Policy Makers for the Bay group has concluded that we must change the way we do business as population in the Chesapeake’s watershed continues to grow&emdash;and continues to sprawl. The population more than doubled from 8.1 million in 1950 to 17 million today. There are 3.8 million more people since the Bay Program began in 1983. Demographers expect 3 million more by 2030.

We also consume more land per capita. The average household size decreased during the last 30 years, but the average lot size increased 60 percent. And we harden more land per capita. From 1990 to 2000, the population grew by 8 percent, while impervious surfaces–paving and roofs grew by a whopping 41 percent. At this rate, in ten years an area more than twice the size of Shenandoah National Park will no longer soak up rain, nutrients, and sediment because of impervious surfaces such as roads, shopping centers, houses, and parking lots.

Policies to channel growth into existing towns and cities and put an end to sprawling development aren’t working. Instead of growing where schools, transportation, and utilities exist, we are growing into forest and fields. In Maryland, the much-touted Smart Growth approach is an abject failure. Thirteen years after its enactment, this non-regulatory approach has had no discernible impact on curbing sprawling development, fostering better land use, or protecting open spaces. Even the Rural Legacy program under Smart Growth has not led to better protection of designated open space areas of fields and forests.

The State of Maryland’s own data details the failure: 78 percent of the land on which new homes were built from 1999-2008 was outside the Priority Funding Areas designated for growth. This compares to 75.6 percent from 1990-1998 before the law went into effect. More single family residential housing was developed outside Smart Growth areas than before the law was enacted. Further, the average amount of land used by each home built inside growth zones has crept upward.

The cost to the Bay states of this failure to rein in sprawl is daunting as such land-abusing development cripples the state financially, socially, and environmentally. Many urban areas, such as Baltimore City, continue to lose population. Of Maryland’s 157 municipalities, 40 lost population from 2000 to 2009 and 61 others had a population increase of less than 100 while the state’s population grew by 7.6 percent. While we close schools, fire houses, libraries, and churches in Baltimore City, we must pay to build similar facilities in surrounding counties.

This sprawl and spread of impervious surfaces is bad for the Bay. Stormwater runoff flushes pollutants to streams and changes their natural flow. It is the only source of water pollution that had been increasing until the economic slowdown. Existing stormwater management laws do not prevent this increasing pollution from development.

The dilemma is that while we have failed to address sprawl development and increasing stormwater flows from new development, existing developed areas present expensive challenges in that stormwater retrofits are generally very expensive. So, as we allow increases in stormwater pollution from new development, the Bay is already overwhelmed from existing runoff from farms and developed lands. The development juggernaut, coupled with the failure to systematically address existing impervious surface pollution, may undo all efforts to revive the Chesapeake.

So what can we do? Our Senior Bay Group has made strong recommendations to solve the problem: Strong state land use controls can eliminate sprawl and stringent stormwater management requirements with impervious surface limits can eliminate any increases in pollutants from runoff from new development. We have recommended that state legislatures and local governments establish a no net loss of forest policy with protection and replanting of forested stream buffers a must. The loss of forests must be ended.

Requirements for and significant funding to clean up runoff from existing urban areas also is needed. Stormwater utilities must be established by all local governments. The states need to develop dedicated funding sources for stormwater retrofits and the establishment of an impervious surface fee on all impervious surfaces (like the Flush Fee) is the most logical source.

We have recommended that all new development have stringent stormwater runoff controls so as to achieve no net increase in pollutants or stormwater flows to the Bay with offsets possible. Scientists have documented even a 3 percent impervious surface cover in a watershed can cause damage to water quality.

All of those concerned with Bay restoration know that losing forests substantially increases the amount of pollutants reaching the Bay. A 2006 report found that from 1982–1997, development destroyed 140 acres of forest a day in the watershed, a total of 750,000 acres. This trend is pre-dicted to accelerate, producing catastrophic results for our rivers and the Bay. Net wetland acreage from a regulatory standpoint appears to have been stopped, but many wetlands still are filled for development and others are impaired by development activities.

However, state legislatures and local governments have not acted to establish a no net loss of forest policy with protection and replanting of forested stream buffers a must. This loss of fo-rests must be ended. Governor O’Malley’s 2007 transition team recommended that this no net loss of forest policy be established but this has not been done. The Chesapeake Bay Agreement called for 10,000 miles of riparian forest buffers by 2010. We’ve planted only a little more than half, and experts say that goal is too modest with at least 30,000 more miles needed to meet restoration goals. Controlling development will help achieve another vital goal – preserving forest land.

Unless we are prepared to accept a continuously declining Chesapeake Bay and the loss of our natural heritage, these difficult measures must be adopted — and soon.

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(Posted by Mary Ann Lisanti.)

Two decades ago, when the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort began, the leadership of local officials was viewed as nice, but not essential. Times have changed. Today, with the deadline to develop local Watershed Implementation Plans looming, it’s clear that when it comes to improving the health of our local rivers and streams, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay, the elected leaders of town and county governments and the appointed leaders of local soil conservation, storm water, and planning districts throughout the Chesapeake watershed will be the ones to make it happen.

However, the feedback coming from local government is simply this: They need information, direction, and flexibility in choosing approaches, otherwise budget challenges will keep them from reaching their goals.

As the chair of the Local Government Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Executive Council, it has become clear to me that there is a real disconnect between the expectations of the federal officials managing the new Chesapeake TMDL process and the understanding of many of the local government officials now charged with developing the plans to implement watershed improvements.

This is a critical moment that calls for clear, direct communication to local governments so local officials understand what they need to do, and understand the benefits their work holds for their communities.

Our committee, called LGAC for short, has begun to address this need. We worked with private funders and communication professionals to develop an initial education piece for local government leaders. We plan to follow it with more information. Last week in Richmond I presented the need for communication to the Chesapeake Executive Council and the Bay Program leaders. We now have their attention, but we need more help to get out the word.

There are 1,800 units of local governments in the watershed and nearly 11,000 elected officials. Reaching them all will take time. Individuals can help. The senior Bay leaders who created this blog and the Chesapeake Bay Action Plan can be of particular help. You are all influential, committed, and have been for a long time. You understand how the actions taken locally benefit not just that community, but the system as a whole. You can help us reach leaders in your communities.

Download a copy of our report, Our Waters, Our Towns, and put it in the hands of local elected officials and influential community leaders. Help us fill the information gap. Help them understand what they need to do, and how it will benefit them and their community.

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(Posted by Erik Michelson.)

After centuries of unregulated wetland filling, land clearing, and shoreline modification, over the course of the past several decades, federal, state, and local regulations have been put in place ostensibly to reverse the trend of the declining health of the country’s waterways. As a rule, these have taken the form of a sequence of three options: “avoid, minimize, mitigate.” So, in the context of a development project, impacts to wetlands or trees in the critical area buffer should be avoided if at all possible, and if not avoided, minimized. Any impacts that do occur, should either be mitigated, or offset, preferably on the same site where they originally occurred, but if not there, somewhere else in the same jurisdiction.

The merits of this system can be debated, particularly the stringency with which the avoidance and minimization lines are upheld (or not), but at least in terms of metrics (e.g., acres of non-tidal wetlands) this method has a rigidity that allows politicians and bureaucrats to proudly declare “no net loss” of resources.

But what if, in the context of restoration, one’s intention is to increase the ecosystem benefits of a project without doing it in precisely the 1 to 1, in-kind ratio demanded by a strict metrics-based accounting? What if, on the way towards restoration, it becomes necessary to actually violate the letter of the law?

Turns out these aren’t just hypothetical questions. Certain stream and wetland restoration methods that have been studied by the University of Maryland have been shown to have the capacity to trap and treat sediment and nutrients, and create high quality habitat for wildlife. These projects involve permanently connecting eroded or incised streams to their surrounding floodplains. In virtually all cases, this involves temporary impacts to streams or adjacent wetlands with the goal of enhancing and improving the quality of the overall resource, both in terms of the metrics of record, but also in terms of less tangible factors, such as increasing fish spawning habitat. Nevertheless, the regulatory comments on these projects come back as though they were development projects, impacting natural resources so that a Wal-Mart parking lot could be built upon them, rather than capping old agricultural sediments trapped in a stream valley with a rich, biodiverse wetland so that they can no longer wash down to tidewater with each rain event.

Additional evidence that our current regulatory framework is more properly aimed at slowing the decline of the resource, rather than facilitating its recovery, could not be clearer than in the case of rare, threatened, and endangered plants. Any entry level gardener can go to Home Depot or the nursery down the street and buy a suite of noxious, invasive plants, such as English ivy or purple loosefstrife to drop into their flower beds and colonize the surrounding woods and wetlands. But, heaven forbid you want to try to bring back a rare, threatened, or endangered native plant species. Should you be so enterprising as to try, you will need a permit from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) just to possess or transport them. Best not to bother even trying to “re-introduce” them. DNR currently has no guidelines or standards in place to review such permits. The system is turned on its head.

At its worst, a purely metrics-based regulatory approach can actually harm the resource that it is intended to protect. Take the case of the South River. As mitigation for damage done to tidal wetlands as part of a bridge construction project, the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) was required by the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) to create tidal wetlands elsewhere in the watershed. On its face, it seems reasonable enough. The trouble is, the tidal wetlands that were disturbed as a result of the bridge crossing were only there because over the past century or so, agricultural sediments, rich in nutrients, washed into the open water of the river, filled it in, and became colonized with invasive phragmites reed. So, in order to compensate for disturbing an acre of farm mud in the river, the chief regulatory agency, despite the objection of a number of other regulatory partners and the South River Federation, required SHA to dump more fill and stone along the shoreline at South River Farm Park so that they could declare “no net loss” of wetlands. Meanwhile, we’ve lost an acre of shallow water fish habitat and several thousand feet of intertidal beach habitat, where horseshoe crabs and terrapins could nest. A better solution was on the table, but the regulators forced SHA back to the drawing board to spend more taxpayer money on an inferior design that was worse for the South River.

Current, federal efforts, led by the Environmental Protection Agency, requiring that the pieces for Chesapeake Bay recovery be put in place by 2025 make these issues all the more salient. Even with unlimited funding and complete local support, neither of which exists, reaching Bay clean-up goals is a stretch in that timeframe. Without a regulatory apparatus that can move smoothly between development and restoration review, and expedite and evolve its understanding of the latter, it will be impossible.

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Here is some local television coverage from our June 30, 2011, action in the Anacostia River protesting the 28th year of not meeting the Clean Water Act deadline. We got terrific national and local media coverage.

At the event organizers called for for readily-achievable actions by Prince Georges County, the District of Columbia, states and the EPA to put the River and all bay rivers on a path to reach the Clean Water Act’s long-postponed fishable and swimmable goal. (See our press release.)

Thanks to all who came out, and to the Anacostia Watershed Society and the Anacostia Riverkeeper for co-sponsoring. Here’s hoping that we won’t see a 29th year.

“Anacostia River needs cleaning, environmentalists say,” June 30, 2011, WJLA ABC Channel 7:

“Protesters Take Plunge Into Anacostia River,” June 30, 2011, Fox 5:

“Protesters Say Anacostia Plunge Is Cleanup Call,” June 30, 2011, WUSA9

(Footage courtesy Lauren Gentile):

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That’s the date by which the Clean Water Act promised that America’s waterways would be fishable and swimmable.

It’s 28 years since that deadline came and went. To bring attention to this anniverary, a group of hardy souls plunged into the murky waters of the Anacostia River to protest the continued failure to make good on that promise.

Thanks to everyone who came out today!

Read more about the event here:
“Getting dirty to clean up the Anacostia River,” WTOP.

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