Chesapeake Bay Action Plan

(Posted by Erik Michelsen)

In preparing for the 2012 Maryland Legislative session, the memories of largely unproductive sessions for the environment in 2010 and 2011 were very fresh. The combined environmental community – the Clean Water, Healthy Families coalition – resolved to be more focused, to pursue a direct request of legislators, and to focus on goals that would have a measurable impact on improving water quality. Those goals were:

• Finish upgrading the wastewater treatment plants that Maryland has already committed to upgrade.
• Ensure that local governments have resources to reduce polluted stormwater runoff and implement their local clean water plans.
• Reduce pollution from poorly planned development – including limiting new septic systems.
• Require that all wastewater discharges, including septic systems, are treated at the highest levels to protect public health and ensure clean water.

The first two goals were explicitly stated in Maryland’s Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) and comprised the core funding strategies for the state’s efforts to address pollution from its central urban and suburban corridor. The last two were focused on ensuring that we don’t erase any gains we make via the first two by developing in a way that creates a staggering amount of new pollution.

As the clock ran down on the legislative session yesterday, the future of the Chesapeake and Maryland’s rivers hung in the balance. Early in the day, legislation to double the Bay Restoration Fund (or “flush fee”) passed, followed by a bill aimed at limiting sprawling growth by restricting where septic-served subdivisions can be located. The debate on a bill to require the 10 largest jurisdictions in the state to create dedicated stormwater restoration fees carried on late into the evening, with opponents, largely from the eastern shore and western Maryland, attempting to filibuster until the end of session, at midnight.

At one point, the floor leader for the bill, Senator Paul Pinsky, asked the opponents – many of whom had invented, and then promulgated, the notion of a “war on rural Maryland”  – why, when they opposed additional water quality regulations on farms on the grounds that agriculture wasn’t the only source of pollution to the bay,  they opposed a bill whose impacts fell most heavily on the densest areas of the state. The opponents fell back to a line of defense that can only be characterized as diversionary. They argued that Maryland’s overall pollution contribution was insignificant compared to the contribution of other states, that the cost of compliance was too expensive, and that the Chesapeake Bay TMDL “pollution diet” was in litigation, so there was no need to rush to address it.

Never mind the fact that the bill was aimed at jurisdictions with an MS4 stormwater permit, which has conditions and requirements that exist independent of the TMDL. Eventually though, the filibuster was shut down, those in favor of the bill in the Senate prevailed, and the bill was sent back to House and passed with 10 minutes to spare in the session.

The community still intends to pursue, through regulations, a requirement that all new septic systems be built using the best available technology, but we ended the evening with three of our four goals in hand and a strong commitment to address the fourth. There can be little doubt that the 2012 session will go down in Maryland lore as the “Session of the Bay,” despite the fact that it was tumultuous in many other respects.

And, with the close of the 2012, Maryland’s cities, town, and suburban enclaves are well positioned to meet their pollution reduction goals going forward. They have developed their plans and now have been given the tools to implement them in a timely fashion. There still remains important work to be done in other sectors, though, with Maryland’s nutrient management regulations still under consideration and an agricultural community divided over its willingness to be a full player in the recovery of Maryland’s most valuable natural resource. The session has ended, but the journey to restoration has just begun.

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(Posted by Gerald Winegrad)

Maryland’s 2012 General Assembly Session is now more than halfway over, and while elected officials are currently focused on the state’s budget, several pieces of important Chesapeake Bay legislation that would help clean up our waters await committee votes.

Today the Executive Council of the Senior Scientists and Policymakers for the Bay delivered this letter to key legislators in support of the following legislation that is in line with our 25-step “action plan,”  specifically with respect to science-based recommendations to control agricultural pollution, foster clean development, upgrade septic systems, and improve wastewater treatment plants:

• Reduce pollution from the spreading of animal waste on farm fields (Senate Bill 594)–See my recent Baltimore Sun op-ed and Will Morrow’s letter to the editor on the need for this legislation.
• Finish upgrading the wastewater treatment plants that Maryland has already committed to upgrade with enhanced revenues from the Bay Restoration Fund (Senate Bill 240 / House Bill 446)
• Ensure that local governments have resources to reduce polluted stormwater runoff and that they implement their local clean water plans (Senate Bill 614 / House Bill 987)
• Reduce pollution from poorly planned development by limiting new septic systems (Senate Bill 236 / House Bill 445)
• Require that all wastewater discharges, including septic systems, are treated at the level of best available technology to protect public health and ensure clean water (Through Amendments to Senate Bill 236 / House Bill 445 or by Regulation)

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(This ninth installment in our series, What’s It Going to Take?, looks at how the environmental community can regain the initiative and build the political will necessary to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.)

In this exclusive interview with the Bay Action Plan, Chesapeake Bay Program Director Nick DiPasquale says that the costs of cleaning the Chesapeake Bay are significant, but manageable.

“No time is a good time when you’re talking about trying to implement very costly pollution control measures,” DiPasquale said. “But when you spread that cost over the life of a project…you find that the cost to individual households is a few dollars a month. Compare it to cellphone or cable costs, it puts things into perspective.”

Watch the video:

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(Posted by Stuart Clarke)

(This is the seventh in an ongoing series of posts on What’s It Going to Take?: A look at how the environmental community can regain the initiative and build the political will necessary to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.)

The Town Creek Foundation will be spending out our endowment and closing our doors in the next ten years. As we approach our sunset, we are working to blend our concern with achieving tangible progress restoring the Chesapeake Bay with our desire to help catalyze the systemic transformations necessary to make that progress sustainable.

We believe that Maryland’s efforts to restore the Bay have evolved to the point where a special window of opportunity has opened for substantial progress. With the Chesapeake Bay TMDL and the Watershed Implementation Plan process, Maryland has established clear goals, an ambitious timetable, and reasonably robust planning processes. Much work remains to be done to sustain this effort where it is strong and to strengthen it where it is weak, and over the next ten years we will be investing in this work.

In this we are partnering with groups that are sharply focused on reducing stormwater and agricultural runoff in order to improve water quality in the local tributaries that flow into the Bay. We share their concern with these kinds of discrete outcomes, and we recognize that specific changes in policy and practice can help to achieve them.

At the same time, we view a degraded Bay as not simply a consequence of bad policies and practices, but also as a dramatic symptom of systemic dysfunction. A degraded Bay is a logical outcome of local and regional systems of production and consumption that deplete resources and generate wastes at unsustainable rates. These local and regional systems reflect and reinforce a global system that is itself in crisis.

Ecological imbalance is the signature of the Bay’s deterioration, just as surely as it explains global deforestation and desertification, the worldwide depletion of aquifers and fisheries, and global climate change.

We believe that both levels of systemic dysfunction – the local and the global – will have severe consequences for Maryland’s ability to sustainably achieve its environmental goals.

At the local and regional level, Maryland’s ability to sustain progress on restoring the Bay is vulnerable to its continued commitment to systemic practices that ignore some of the fundamental realities of life on a finite planet. Our Bay restoration initiatives are consensus products of a particular political moment that ignores the consequences of planetary finitude and operates as if ‘balancing the economy and the environment’ can and should mean protecting our ecological systems while also continuing to consume and dispose of ever increasing amounts of stuff.

Ultimately we will need to crack open this consensus in order to ask and answer some of the really tough questions about the Bay’s future. Is a sustainably restored Bay compatible with the maintenance and expansion of a system of industrial agriculture that concentrates animals on areas of land that are too small to absorb those wastes? Does one of our most politically popular strategies for reconciling environmental and economic imperatives  – market based nutrient trading schemes – exist in part to convince us that the environmental impacts of perpetual growth can be perpetually deferred? Is this a tenable proposition?

We expect that accelerating systemic dysfunction at the global level will mean that Maryland will be seeking to sustain progress on restoring the Bay under conditions that are quite different from those with which we have become familiar. It is not difficult, for example, to imagine how the acceleration and intensification of extreme weather events that is predicted by climate scientists could overwhelm our current Bay restoration strategies. But climate change is only the tip of the iceberg – global ecosystems are under full on assault, and embattled ecosystems are prone to producing dramatic waves of economic and political instability. Researchers and policymakers are expressing growing concern about an increase in “the frequency and intensity of environmental crises associated with accelerating human-induced global change.” Many expect that ‘concatenated crises’ like the oil‐food‐financial crisis of 2007 ‐ 2008 will be more rather than less frequent in the future. The direction and consequences of these are unknown, but it’s a fair bet that – at the very least –they will continue to reduce the room for fiscal maneuver that has been indispensable to ecosystem restoration.

Approaching the deterioration of the Bay as a systemic problem – or, more precisely, as a predictable outcome of dysfunctional systems – suggests a critical need for reducing our reliance on unsustainable local and regional systems while also increasing our resilience in the face of accelerating global instability. Maryland’s ambitious initiatives to restore the bay are important steps towards greater sustainability and resilience, but we doubt that they will be enough.

We think that true sustainability and resilience for Maryland ‐ in an increasingly unstable, crisis-prone world – will depend on fundamental transformations of the systems (including the value systems) by which everyday life is organized. In this regard bringing the economy and the environment into balance does not mean protecting the environment only so long as doing so won’t undermine economic growth. It means right-sizing and reorganizing the economy so that it can sustain itself on a finite planet.

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(Posted by Chris Trumbauer,  Anne Arundel County Councilman) 

(This is fifth in an ongoing series of posts on What’s It Going to Take?: A look at how the environmental community can regain the initiative and build the political will necessary to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.)

If your family is like mine, the struggling economy is making every household economical decision a critical one. I cringed when I got my latest fuel oil bill and turned the thermostat down a couple of degrees to try and lessen the pain of the next bill. My wife and I both own fuel-efficient cars, but we still restrict driving as much as possible to delay filling up our tank as long as we can. Like many families, we are putting off important purchases, hoping to get a little more time out of a pair of shoes or a winter coat.

None of this, however, dampens my strong desire for clean water and healthy air. Pollution is pollution whether it contaminates our environment in a recession, or in an economic boom. My lungs don’t care what the return on my 401k is, and my kids don’t think about what the price of gasoline is before they jump into the Chesapeake Bay. Why are we all suddenly on the defensive in our fight for our environment? From the federal battles over the EPA to land-use decisions on the local level, we are seeing our environmental protections threatened, when they should be strengthened. Government’s overarching goal is to protect its people, and that includes protecting them from the threat of pollution.

Right now, far too often, the economy is being used as an excuse not to meet our obligations to provide the basic security of fishable, swimable waterways. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark Clean Water Act. Now is not the time for us to walk away from our commitment to clean water – it’s time to double down. The health of the Chesapeake Bay and our local waterways is intertwined with a healthy economy. So is the quality of life of our communities. Investing in cleaning up our environment will create jobs, not kill them, as some would have you believe. For too long, we have been fed this false choice of jobs versus the environment. Enough is enough.

Think back to the last election cycle and all the robocalls and political mailers you received. Do you remember any candidates who claimed they did not support cleaning up our environment? Probably not. Now that those candidates (including me) are in office, think about whether their actions match their stated commitment to our waterways and our environment. Broad, non-specific support for “the Bay” does not always translate to having the political will to achieve policy.

In Anne Arundel County, I sponsored a bipartisan bill to establish dedicated funding for in-the-ground restoration projects to reduce pollution from stormwater runoff. At the public hearing, nearly 30 people offered compelling testimony in favor of the bill, including community leaders, health officials, boaters, and grassroots advocates. Only a handful of people testified in opposition. Despite the broad show of support, and general acknowledgment of the problem, the measure was withdrawn because there were not enough votes for passage. A case study in the lack of political will to clean up our waterways.

What will it take to turn the corner on restoring the environmental (and economical) treasure that is the Chesapeake Bay?

• Realistic expectations. We cannot “wish” the Bay better with positive thoughts and feel-good measures alone. Serious problems require serious solutions and those solutions can and will cost money. We need to consider the long-term impacts of an impaired Bay when we consider the current investments needed to secure our fisheries, recreational activities, maritime industry, and other benefits of a restored Bay. What will it cost us if we fail to act?
• Willingness to try new things. While acknowledging the progress we have made, we must also realize it has not been enough. The tactics of voluntary measures and loose enforcement of environmental laws is not working. Regulation of pollution and strong management actions have successfully restored other waterways and they can work on the Bay, too.
• A renewed sense of accountability. We cannot keep failing to meet deadlines and goals with no consequence. If we are asking our citizens to change their behavior or share in the responsibility to clean up our waterways, our leaders need to hold up their end of the bargain by making sure the right policies are in place to reduce pollution enough to make a difference.

We are making real progress in the fight to clean up our waterways. A recent report found that we were about halfway to our Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort goals. That progress represents an investment of decades of work and millions of dollars. The progress has been slow but we’ve come too far to give up now and jeopardize all the work that we have done up to now.

It’s time to put up or shut up. This is our opportunity to finish the job, not come up with more excuses. We absolutely must focus and control growth, regulate and reduce pollution from all sources, and change our behavior. None of these things are simple, and some are expensive, but they are all necessary if we want our future to include a restored Chesapeake Bay and a healthy local economy.

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