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March 26, 2023

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Ecosystem Eco Portal Lead News News Homepage News News Portal Highlights

Chesapeake Bay Foundation Leader Calls for Shifts in Bay Cleanup

March 8, 2023 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

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Hilary Harp Falk, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Photo by David Trozzo

A little over a year ago, Hilary Harp Falk took over as president and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, becoming only the third leader of the group since its founding in 1967. Before joining CBF, she spent nearly 13 years with the National Wildlife Federation, where she rose to become chief program officer.

Falk has roots in the Bay watershed and history with CBF. A Maryland native, she says she developed a passion for conservation while exploring the Bay’s edges in her childhood with her father, photographer Dave Harp (who is the Bay Journal staff photographer). She began her career as a college intern for CBF and, after graduating, became an educator at its Port Isobel Education Center.

She took the helm at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that the Bay restoration effort would likely miss many of its goals by the self-imposed deadline of 2025. Thirteen months later, she sat down with Tim Wheeler, the Bay Journal’s associate editor and senior writer, to talk about the future of the restoration effort and CBF’s role in it.

What follows are excerpts of the interview, edited for space and clarity.

Question: When you became president at CBF, were you surprised to find the Bay restoration effort, which is 40 years old this year, wasn’t further along?

Answer: It’s been interesting to be away for a decade working on national issues and to come back and see both a lot of progress over the last decade and some of the same challenges. We’re all grappling right now [with] this big transition in the Chesapeake Bay movement, with new leaders, at a critical moment for the cleanup. I think there’s plenty to reflect on and consider, and a lot to be excited and optimistic about.

Q: Why do you think there hasn’t been more progress?

A: It’s really important to acknowledge that 2025 was an important deadline, but it was never going to be the finish line. While we’ve made significant progress in reducing pollution from wastewater treatment, we still have not made the reductions that we need in polluted runoff from farms, cities and towns. Certainly, the defining challenge of the Bay movement now is to address pollution running off farms.

Q: You have suggested that the restoration effort needs a dose of “integrity and honesty.” Can you elaborate?

A: We’ve been really focused on the Chesapeake Bay Blueprint [officially called the Bay’s total maximum daily load, or TMDL] and the numbers that we need to hit. What I get concerned about is, are we making meaningful progress and looking at what it’s really going to take to return clean water to the Bay?

I think we need to look at the quality of our plans as much as we need to look at the quantity behind our plans. We have some of the best science and the best modeling in the world. But how can we really couple that with a robust monitoring system and understand how to meaningfully verify progress?

Q: Some key elements of the restoration effort have been questioned, including how well some farm practices actually control polluted runoff. Do we really know what’s working and what’s needed?

A: Two thoughts on that. First, climate change changes everything…. We need to know a lot more about how climate change is impacting the Bay.

Second, we need to pay for outcomes, especially as it relates to polluted runoff from farms. We need to know through documented proof that the investments we’re making are going to have the desired outcome. And I think that is certainly a big gap in the Bay cleanup right now. We are investing an incredible amount of money into the cleanup generally [and] especially best management practices on farms. We need to know that they’re working and that we can see the benefits to local rivers and streams.

Q: Is reducing nutrient pollution really the most important part of restoring the Bay? The federal Clean Water Act calls for fishable and swimmable waters. How does reducing the Bay’s nutrient load make the water fishable or swimmable?

A: We need to focus more on people and communities. And when we do that, we know that the pollution to the Bay is not just [the nutrients] nitrogen and phosphorus, and sediment. It’s also legacy pollution, toxics and temperature. And those are the kinds of things that we need to focus on in addition to looking at the [nutrient and sediment] goals under the Blueprint.

Q: Not long ago, CBF didn’t pay much attention to toxic pollution. Is that changing?

A: Absolutely. The communities that have been left behind, the frontline and fence-line communities that regularly deal with environmental injustices, are very interested in knowing what’s in the water and what’s impacting their communities. And so, here at CBF, we’re very focused on making sure that the benefits of clean water and healthy communities are enjoyed by everybody.

Q: There is a lot of concern these days about PFAS [per– and polyfluoroalkyl substances], so-called “forever chemicals” in water supplies, streams and fish. Is CBF doing anything to be more of an advocate in that area?

A: We’re pretty concerned about PFAS too. Like other toxic chemicals, we know that we need to know a lot more. We just don’t know enough in order to advance advocacy for addressing them.

Q: You’ve talked about the importance of putting people and communities at the center of the Bay cleanup. What does that mean?

A: It means that we need to make sure that we’re looking at the siting of different energy sources, and we need to make sure that we’re not neglecting communities that have been left behind, by ensuring that they have the support they need to challenge the issues that they face.

Q: What has CBF been doing lately to make its leadership, staff and work more diverse and inclusive?

A: We’re really excited this year to bring on a vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. [Carmera Thomas-Wilhite, former director of urban conservation initiatives at the Conservation Fund, recently returned to CBF, where she began her career as the Baltimore program manager.] We’re focused on making sure that our organization is inclusive and equitable. And we’re working to build trainings and webinars so that our staff knows and can understand the history of this country and this movement, which includes racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression. [It’s important that] we are advocating for the rights of everyone to have clean water and clean air, and that we are standing shoulder to shoulder with communities who have not enjoyed those benefits or are having issues with flooding or different environmental injustices.

Q: In discussing the Bay restoration, you said recently, “We’ll take a quick look back, but we also know in an age of climate change that we can’t go back. That Bay doesn’t exist anymore.” What did you mean by that?

A: A lot of times we evoke the Bay of 400 years ago, before colonialism. So much has changed during that time. The Bay watershed is now home to almost 19 million people. We’re in the age of climate change. That means we are not going back to that Bay. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t have a really bright future, because we have made so much progress on Bay restoration. We see some examples where we are improving water quality. We see the boom in oyster restoration and oyster aquaculture.

Q: What do you consider a restored Bay, then? Is it one full of crabs, rockfish and oysters or invasive blue catfish and snakeheads? Or all of the above?

A: I think a restored Bay is one where we have healthy habitat, we have resilient shorelines, we have healthy fisheries. And I think all of those things are absolutely possible.

Q: You’ve said you are among a new generation of Bay leaders, such as those at the Chesapeake Bay Commission and EPA Bay Program office. What do you bring to this effort that’s new or different?

A: Well, like many of the new Bay leaders, I’ve gotten to be part of and watch the last 40 years of effort, science [and] restoration. So, I’m pretty clear on the challenges that we face. But also we are optimistic, determined, and I think we also are collaborative. We’re all talking all the time, and I think that those relationships and collaboration will set us apart…. We all know that we stand on the shoulders of the first generation to really raise the alarms about the Bay. We are now taking the baton and need to look at new and creative ways of leading, trying different things, making new mistakes and really building a future that we can all be excited about.

Q: You’ve described Adam Ortiz, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional administrator, as a “wonderful partner.” What does that mean? CBF is part of a lawsuit accusing the EPA of not doing enough to get Pennsylvania on track with its share of pollution reductions.

A: It means that we’ve had really productive conversations about the current lawsuit…. I think the EPA is in good hands right now. I think they’re doing a lot of important work, specifically behind the scenes, talking with leaders in Pennsylvania and really understanding the problems that Pennsylvania faces. And I think that’s exactly what the EPA should be doing, in addition to holding the states accountable and making sure that the EPA is there to enforce the laws.

Q: After years of debate and inaction, Pennsylvania last year created the state’s first dedicated source of clean water funding. But it comes from federal money and isn’t nearly enough to close the state’s funding gap for Bay restoration work. What’s happened with that since?

A: The Clean Streams Fund was a really important down payment and a moment for leadership for Pennsylvania. But it was a down payment. There’s so much more that Pennsylvania needs to do. Pennsylvania is one of our biggest challenges.

But I also think it’s a huge opportunity, especially when Pennsylvanians are leading. And I see a lot of really great leadership in Lancaster County right now, building community-based plans that are defined by people who live there. Community based organizations, members of our team [and businesses are] all pulling together to figure out what Lancaster needs to do to protect its rivers and streams.

When we see that kind of effort, it gives me a lot of hope. That’s the way things are going to change.

Q: What would you put in a new Bay agreement if you were creating it? How would you craft it?

A: I’d make sure that it includes climate mitigation goals in addition to climate adaptation goals. We’re not going to save the Bay without addressing the climate crisis. I think we need to take a hard look at toxics and other chemicals of concern…. We need to really focus on growing the monitoring data. And we should really be focused on our biggest challenges and our biggest opportunities, which means a lot more thinking about agriculture and soil health.

One of our challenges is that we have really defined the Bay cleanup based on nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment. Now we have an opportunity to look more broadly at a number of other issues. As we are updating the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, that’s a huge opportunity to look past nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into other issues and really redefine what it means to save the Bay.

By Tim Wheeler

Filed Under: Eco Portal Lead, News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Maryland Approves Expansion of Eastern Shore Poultry Plant Despite Pollution History

February 6, 2023 by Bay Journal 1 Comment

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Maryland state regulators have approved expansion of a controversial poultry rendering plant on the Eastern Shore that just four months ago settled lawsuits accusing it of polluting a Chesapeake Bay tributary for years.

The state Department of the Environment in late December renewed the discharge permit for the Valley Proteins Inc. rendering plant at Linkwood. The permit will allow a nearly four-fold increase in the amount of wastewater the facility can release into the Transquaking River, a nutrient-impaired Bay tributary in Dorchester County.

MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said the permit imposes “substantial reductions” in pollution levels in the discharges. Regulators have added more conditions beyond what had been initially proposed in 2021 in response to public comments, he said, including requiring more monitoring and adequate staffing of the company’s wastewater treatment operation.

Environmental activists, though, complained that MDE, in approving this permit, has put the company’s needs ahead of restoring water quality in the Transquaking.

“There may be some improvement here, but not enough,” said Fred Pomeroy, an oyster farmer who is president of Dorchester Citizens for Planned Growth.  He said MDE was “blatantly wrong” to let Valley Proteins increase its maximum daily discharge from 150,000 gallons to 575,000 gallons, given the chronic pollution problems at the Linkwood plant. “They have not earned a fourfold increase,” he said.

Neighbors and environmental groups have complained for years about the Valley Proteins facility, which takes up to 4 million pounds of chicken entrails and feathers daily from poultry processing plants and renders them into pet food.

They also faulted the state for failing to address multiple violations at the plant over the past decade and for letting it continue to operate with an outdated wastewater treatment system under a discharge permit that expired in 2006. Those permits are supposed to be reviewed and updated every 5 years, but MDE had a backlog last year this time of nearly 200 so-called “zombie” permits.

The state and environmental groups sued the company in February 2022 after one organization, ShoreRivers, captured drone images showing a discolored discharge coming from Valley Proteins’ outfall into a waterway leading to the Transquaking. The visual evidence prompted MDE to inspect and briefly shut down the plant after finding more violations.

The company settled those lawsuits in a Sept. 12 consent decree, in which it promised to fix wastewater treatment violations and curb polluted runoff from the site. It also agreed to pay a $540,000 penalty to the state, plus another $160,000 to the environmental groups for water quality monitoring and restoration.

In a 2021 public hearing and through dozens of written comments, critics called for MDE to impose more stringent limits on the plant and not let it expand until it shows it can meet them. To their disappointment, MDE did not set any such conditions.

“There’s no stopgap or check in place where if noncompliance continues, should they still be allowed to increase their flow?” said Matt Pluta, director of riverkeeper programs at ShoreRivers.

MDE had put out a press release in September 2021 announcing its tentative decision to renew Valley Proteins’ permit with stricter discharge limits. The agency let its final decision be known by posting a pair of legal notices in the local Dorchester County newspaper earlier this month.

In a lengthy written response to public comments, MDE said the company’s request to expand met state regulations. The plant will have to meet “substantially stricter” pollution limits in its discharge following a three-year “compliance period,” during which it is expected to upgrade its treatment system. After that, MDE said the company may increase its discharge.

Doug Myers, senior Maryland scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said MDE had “thrown a bone or two” to critics in its final permit, notably by requiring fish-sustaining oxygen levels to be higher in the plant’s discharge. But other limits the company must meet are largely unchanged from what they had been in the old permit, he contended.

MDE’s permit does propose to lower overall nutrient discharges after the first three years.

Once the plant’s treatment system is upgraded, its annual discharge limits will be 44% lower for nitrogen and 79% lower for phosphorus, according to MDE. Those two nutrients are generally responsible for algae blooms, oxygen depletion and fish kills in the Bay and its tributaries.

The Transquaking, like most Bay tributaries, suffers from excessive nutrient levels, mainly from runoff or seepage from farmland. The Valley Proteins discharge flows downstream into a dammed stretch of the river known as Higgins Millpond.  Locals say the poorly flushed impoundment suffers from poor water quality, diminished fish and outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae, which have poisoned family pets and led to no-swimming warnings.

MDE said it was taking a closer look at water quality in the millpond and would modify the Valley Proteins permit if its assessment indicated tighter discharge limits are warranted. But it said its modeling at this time indicates the pond would be impaired even if the rendering plant wasn’t there.

Suann Guthrie, spokesperson for Darling Ingredients, the Texas-based company that bought Valley Proteins last year, said: “We are committed to continuing to work closely with the Maryland Department of Environment to ensure the Linkwood facility is in full compliance with all relevant rules and regulations.”

Pomeroy, the Dorchester group president, said the Transquaking is hurt not only by Valley Proteins’ discharges but also by the spreading of semi-solid sludge from the plant’s treatment system on nearby farm fields. One day last year, he said, “truck after truck” was spreading the material across a field close to the river while it was raining, conditions that make it likely to become runoff.

The MDE permit does say the company must report where its sludge shipments go and specifies that the nutrient-rich material must be applied “appropriately” so rain won’t wash it into nearby streams.  But ShoreRivers’ Pluta said that provision is toothless because MDE does not regulate the use of sludge on farm fields.

Environmental groups said they were weighing legal action to challenge the permit. Beyond that, they said, they hope the new administration of Gov. Wes Moore follows through on a campaign pledge to beef up enforcement at MDE.  In the budget he presented Jan. 20, Moore proposed adding 67 new positions at MDE to deal with wastewater and drinking water permitting and oversight.

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Filed Under: Eco Lead, News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Chesapeake Bay Foundation Grades Chesapeake’s health a D-plus, Again

January 10, 2023 by Bay Journal 2 Comments

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Low winter light filters through a marsh near the Chesapeake Bay. Photo by Dave Harp

The ecological health of the nation’s largest estuary remains stuck at a low level, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The Annapolis, MD-based environmental group graded the Bay’s overall vitality a D+, the same lackluster mark it got in 2020.

In a note introducing its biennial State of the Bay report, CBF President & CEO Hilary Harp Falk said it “shows there is still a long way to go to create a watershed that works for all of us.”

CBF said that 7 of the 13 pollution, fisheries and habitat indicators it tracks remained unchanged, while three improved and three worsened.

The amount of water-fouling nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into the Bay in 2022 from its major rivers was below the 10-year average, CBF acknowledged. But the past two years saw no real progress in water quality, it said.  While phosphorus levels improved a bit, already poor water clarity declined, and nitrogen pollution stayed unchanged.

The nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus feed algae blooms that reduce water clarity and deplete the water of oxygen when they decompose, causing the Bay’s “dead zone.” The federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program has been struggling for decades to restore water quality, but recently acknowledged it was likely to miss a self-imposed 2025 deadline for reaching pollution reduction goals set in 2010.

The group’s assessments are a blend of science and policy, scoring not just the condition of the Bay and its resources but also the federal and state efforts to restore it.

“The state of the Bay is at a precipice,” said Beth McGee, CBF’s director of science and agricultural policy. “We need to accelerate our efforts at reducing farm pollution to ensure the watershed-wide restoration effort is successful.”

Falk noted that much of the water quality gains to date came from upgrading wastewater treatment plants. To make further progress, she said, increased efforts are needed to reduce pollution from farms — especially in Pennsylvania — and to curb urban and suburban stormwater runoff.

In one of the few bits of good news, CBF upgraded the status of the Bay’s oyster population, citing record reproduction in both Maryland and Virginia in 2020 and 2021. But the group still didn’t give the keystone species a passing grade, saying more is needed to end overfishing and restore lost reef habitat.

CBF’s assessment of striped bass ticked up a point, crediting states with tightening catch limits enough to rebuild its population from dangerously low levels seen just a few years ago.

CBF downgraded the status of blue crabs more than any other Bay health indicator, though, citing the 2022 survey estimating the population at its lowest level in 33 years. Fishery managers in Maryland and Virginia tightened catch limits in response.

As for key Bay habitats, CBF rated conditions of underwater grasses, forest buffers and wetlands unchanged from 2020. But it downgraded slightly the status of “resource lands” — forests, natural open areas and farmland. It cited aerial surveys estimating that 95,000 acres of farms and forests had been lost to development across the Bay watershed over a five-year period ending in 2018.

“While we’ve made significant progress,” Falk said, “far too much pollution still reaches our waterways and climate change is making matters worse.”

Still, the CBF president saw reason for optimism.

“The good news is that the Bay is remarkably resilient and there is tremendous energy around the table,” Falk said. “With many new leaders taking charge — EPA administrators, governors, legislators, and within environmental organizations — we have an opportunity to prove that restoring clean water is possible.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Filed Under: Eco Portal Lead, News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Chesapeake loses a Champion, Nick DiPasquale

December 5, 2022 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

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Nicholas A. “Nick” DiPasquale, who as director of the Chesapeake Bay Program oversaw creation of the agreement that guides today’s restoration efforts and sought to build broader support for that work, died Nov. 24 after a long battle with cancer. He was 71.

Born in Rochester, NY, on Nov. 7, 1951, DiPasquale became committed to environmental work after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a teen. He later spent three decades working on environmental issues with state agencies, nonprofits and as a private consultant before becoming head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office in 2011. There, he worked with states and other partners to craft the expansive 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which serves as the guiding vision for today’s Bay work, from water quality improvement to oyster restoration to land protection.

“The Chesapeake community has lost an incredible voice and advocate,” said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, which represents nearly 300 groups in the region. “Throughout his entire career, Nick possessed an unflappable commitment to clean water and protecting our most precious natural resources.” She praised his “uncanny ability to bridge divides and build consensus, which played a critical role in moving restoration efforts forward for clean water in our region.”

Nick DiPasquale, retired head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program office, sits with his companion, Mac, along the waterfront in Chestertown, MD, in 2021. Dave Harp photo.

He served as Bay Program director for six and a half years before retiring at the end of 2017. His tenure was the second longest of any director in the Bay Program’s 40-year history. It coincided with ramped-up efforts to reduce nutrient pollution to the estuary, and he won praise from many for helping to refocus the state-federal partnership on issues related to fish and other living resources, habitat protection and stream health.

For several previous years, the Bay effort had been mostly focused on Chesapeake water quality and setting nutrient pollution reduction goals in the Bay’s total maximum daily load or “pollution diet.” The intense focus on nutrient reductions during development of the TMDL, which was implemented in 2010, caused some agencies and organizations that were focused on other issues to drift away from participating in the Bay Program.

Nick DiPasquale, then director of the U.S. EPA Chesapeake Bay Program office, speaks at Fletcher’s Cove in Washington, DC, in 2015. Jenna Valente/Chesapeake Bay Program

DiPasquale helped change that through the 2014 agreement, which he considered the highlight of his Bay career. That agreement contains objectives for restoring oysters, improving habitat for brook trout and black ducks, protecting land, expanding citizen stewardship and a host of other activities. It reflected his view that restoring the Bay is about more than cleaning its water. It laid out a vision for the future — and it increased the involvement of agencies and organizations in the Bay effort, including some that had never previously worked on Chesapeake issues.

“When it came to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, Nick really saw the forest for the trees,” said Joel Dunn, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy. “Nick directed the Chesapeake Bay Program at a time when there was a particularly intense focus on the TMDLs, and he helped expand this focus to encompass other key areas like land management and conservation that also impact the health of the Bay watershed.”

Dunn praised DiPasquale for embracing new technologies to tackle environmental problems, including a new multi-year effort that secured imagery of the entire Bay watershed at one-square meter resolution to better identify where conservation work would be most effective and prioritize land for protection. “Although we have much work still before us, Nick’s leadership in his career and in his volunteerism resulted in major gains for the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort,” he said.

DiPasquale sought to expand the geographic reach of Bay efforts. The 2014 agreement was the fourth Bay restoration strategy to be signed by state governors and the EPA administrator, but it was the first to also include the upstream states of Delaware, New York and West Virginia. He also worked to increase the role of watershed residents by enlisting more people in monitoring efforts that could help inform decision making. He also advocated for greater outreach to underserved communities and to ensure they were benefitting from Bay-related work.

Nick DiPasquale, then director of the U.S. EPA Chesapeake Bay Program office, attends the Chesapeake Executive Council meeting in 2015. Steve Droter/Chesapeake Bay Program

Within the Bay Program, DiPasquale had to balance the longstanding tensions between the EPA, which often seeks to be more assertive in Bay Program oversight, and state partners. In meetings, he would present himself as representing the Bay Program, not the EPA.

“This, over the years, has been difficult to explain to the EPA — that while they pay my salary, I really work for the partnership and I have a responsibility to act on decisions that the partnership makes,” DiPasquale said in an interview with the Bay Journal when he retired.

More than once, this perspective led to conflicts with higher-ups in the agency. In his final months on the job, he became embroiled in a controversy with political appointees of the Trump administration over their abrupt decision to retract a grant that helped support the Bay Journal. He ultimately filed a complaint with the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, saying the action violated agency grant regulations. In an interview with Energy & Environment News shortly after his retirement, DiPasquale said the decision was “totally ideologically driven.” Among mounting criticism, the EPA reversed the decision.

DiPasquale was recognized with numerous awards, including being named Admiral of the Chesapeake by the governor of Maryland and receiving the 2018 Clean Water Champion award from the Choose Clean Water Coalition.

DiPasquale also was valued as a mentor for those getting started in environmental fields. “I had the pleasure of working with Nick early in my career, and I will personally remember his staunch support for young professionals making their way through our field,” said Reilly of Choose Clean Water. “The example he set of leadership and collaboration is one that should serve as an example to us all.”

“As we look to the future of Bay restoration efforts, we owe a debt of gratitude to the foundation Nick has laid and are well-served to follow in his footsteps as we work to leave a legacy of clean water to future generations,” she said.

After retirement, DiPasquale settled in Chestertown, MD, and continued his advocacy for the environment by serving on a variety of boards and through speaking engagements. He could be found navigating area waterways in his kayak with his wife, Becky.

Along with Becky, he is survived by his daughter, Laura DiPasquale, and her husband and children, Eric, Alex and Addie Zupan; his sister, her husband and their daughter, MaryEllen, Craig and Alexandria Colling; his brother and his two children, Jim, Danielle and Benjamin DiPasquale; and his stepdaughter, her husband and children, Jess, Simon, Caroline and Emily Nichols.

By Karl Blankenship

Filed Under: News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Chesapeake Bay Commission’s Ann Swanson Passes the Baton After 35 years

November 26, 2022 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

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Not long after Ann Swanson began working to restore the Chesapeake Bay, she found herself speaking about it to a group of grade school students. One youngster raised his hand and asked her, “What are you going to do when the Bay is saved? What’s your next job?”

Ann Swanson (photo by Dave Harp)

Swanson recalls that question with a wry smile. She never got another job. She’s been laboring for nearly four decades to clean up and revitalize the ailing estuary. On Nov. 21, she retired after almost 35 years as executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, the tri-state legislative advisory body that’s been a key player in the long-running regional effort.

The Bay still hasn’t been saved and, in a sense, it never will be. But that it hasn’t been for want of trying, especially on her part.

“She’s had the spirit, the brainpower, the drive to keep pressing forward on all fronts,” said John Griffin, a former Maryland Natural Resources secretary and gubernatorial aide who’s known and worked with Swanson most of those years.

She’s been at it since 1983, first as a grassroots coordinator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, then at the Bay Commission, where she was hired five years later.

The 21-member commission, representing the legislatures of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, has been a signatory of every Bay restoration agreement — along with governors and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrators. Swanson has been an adviser to those lawmakers and an advocate for the dozens of Bay-related bills and funding measures they’ve sponsored.

‘Leader of the band’

“She’s been really the leader of the band for decades,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). He called her “the conductor … the maestro” who’s kept members focused on what’s needed.

Swanson characteristically deflects credit to the commission members themselves and to her staff. But state Sen. Sarah Elfreth (D-Anne Arundel), the commission’s current chair said, “she really guides a lot of our work,” advising them on the most critical issues and what measures are most likely to succeed.

The Bay Commission post has been her dream job, Swanson said. It meant working collaboratively across state and party lines to pass legislation and get funding to improve the health of the Bay, its rivers and streams, and its living resources. “I always wanted to work in conservation,” she said. “I wanted to work at the regional scale.”

But for some serendipitous networking, Swanson might have wound up elsewhere. She grew up on Long Island in New York and attended the University of Vermont, majoring in wildlife biology. She also earned a master’s degree in environmental studies at Yale University. Her first job was as assistant state naturalist in Vermont.

It was an internship with the National Wildlife Federation that brought her to the Bay region. She got it with a little help from her physician father, who — worried about her job prospects — talked her up to a federation executive he met on a cruise. One of her mentors at the federation later urged her to apply for a job with the Bay Foundation.

Barely a month into her job with the foundation, she was present at the 1983 conference — sponsored by the Bay Commission — where the first formal agreement was signed by federal and state leaders pledging to work together to restore the Chesapeake and created the state-federal Bay Program. Remembering it today still moves her.

“It was 1,000 people who deeply cared. And it was an issue that had become so compelling and so politically important that everyone wanted to be in the room.”

Back then, she and many others thought that kind of spirit could save the Bay in a decade or so. Within a few years, Maryland and Virginia passed laws to curb sediment pollution from construction sites, and those two states and Pennsylvania each banned the use of phosphate detergents. Maryland and Virginia passed laws limiting waterfront development. Pennsylvania adopted a law requiring farmers to manage fertilizer applications.

Broker of new ideas

The Bay Commission, Swanson said, “has played a critical role in in the trajectory of the whole Bay program because we’ve often been the broker of either a new idea or a … solution.”

In the mid-1990s, amid tensions between Maryland and Virginia over the economically important blue crab fishery, the commission formed a bistate advisory committee that brought together legislators, watermen, scientists and fishery managers to hash out their differences. Swanson chaired a workgroup of scientists and economists that over eight years helped forge an agreement between the states to rely on science to manage crabs as a single fishery across state lines.

With Swanson organizing meetings and writing up testimony and talking points, the commission has also advocated, often successfully, for maintaining and even increasing federal funding for the Bay.

“Ann has been front and center in that effort,” Van Hollen said, “and that includes everything from the annual funding for the EPA for the Bay Program to our efforts to expand support from the agricultural conservation programs.”

Van Hollen, who’s worked with Swanson both in the Maryland legislature and in Congress, said she has a rare ability to distill and communicate the complexities of Bay issues. “She gets the science, she gets the policy and she gets the politics. That’s just an invaluable combination.”

She’s also helped the commission work without rancor. It has both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, but they’ve operated collegially. While partisan differences have grown sharper in state legislatures, they have not carried over to commission meetings.

Politics absent

“It’s probably the most bipartisan or nonpartisan organization that I’ve ever been involved with,” said Pennsylvania Sen. Gene Yaw, a Republican commission member. “Politics doesn’t come up.”

Elfreth, a Democrat, credits Swanson with helping to maintain that culture. She also views her as a mentor. “There’s not been nearly enough women on the commission,” Elfreth said. While their numbers have grown, she noted that at times in the past, “Ann has been the only female voice in the room.” Seeing Swanson among the Bay restoration leadership, she said, has “meant a lot to me as a young woman starting off in my political career.”

Those who think the Bay cleanup effort has gone soft or astray are less impressed with the commission or Swanson’s leadership. Gerald Winegrad, a former Maryland state senator who served on the commission when Swanson was hired, said he hasn’t seen it take any bold or controversial stances in recent years.

“Show me an organization that’s done it better,” Swanson countered. The commission “always has to consider the science, consider the appropriate policy and then consider the do-able,” she continued. “The commission has never worked on policy that’s pablum. They haven’t. They’ve always pushed for something that was meaningful.”

Initiatives advocated by the commission haven’t always been embraced by all three states. It took Pennsylvania lawmakers 11 years to pass limits on lawn fertilizer similar to the bills that sailed through Maryland’s and Virginia’s legislatures in 2011.

“That had to be a high point,” Yaw said of the fertilizer vote earlier this year. “It’s something that she was really frustrated by.” He credited the bill’s ultimate passage to Swanson’s persistence, noting that she had spent “a ton of time” in the past year visiting Harrisburg to buttonhole legislators.

She wasn’t there just for the fertilizer bill, but also for bigger quarry. She was urging lawmakers to take advantage of a big influx of federal COVID relief funds and direct some of it toward cleaning up the state’s rivers and streams — and, by extension, the Bay. In June, they approved using $220 million to create a Clean Streams Fund, with most of it slated to help farmers control nutrient– and sediment-laden runoff. The vote broke a years-long stalemate over getting the legislature to financially boost the state’s lagging Bay cleanup efforts.

Elusive goals

In the years since Swanson started at the commission, Bay water quality has improved — just not enough. The amounts of water-fouling nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment reaching it have declined over the decades, yet still only about 30% of the Bay and its tidal rivers meet water quality standards.

“The conservation, the protection of the Chesapeake Bay has proved far more difficult and much more of a long reach than I ever expected,” she said.

Federal and state leaders recently acknowledged that many goals and outcomes pledged in the latest Bay restoration agreement, signed in 2014 by state and federal leaders, will not be met by their 2025 target date. There’s talk of extending the deadline or rethinking goals.

For Swanson, that’s no reason to let up now.

“We have more money on the table than we’ve ever had,” she said, referring to the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled to states nationwide in the federal infrastructure and inflation reduction bills. “If we can just harness that, and make sure that we spend the money smartly, and listen to our science and use our targeting tools, we actually have the ability to leapfrog in terms of progress.”

She’s leaving that for others now. Asked how she felt about that, she looked away, and her voice thickened.

“I feel like my job … I didn’t finish. However, I also feel that the time is right. Because there’s got to be a newer younger generation coming up. I’ve been at this job 35 years, and it’s done.”

She’ll be 65 in December. Her husband, Eric, retired five years ago and has taken a few trips without her because her work prevented her from going. Her mother is 93 and needs her care.

“I have gardens to grow, I have meals to cook, I have the world to see,” she added. “There’s got to be time in the day for friends. … And so, it’s just the right time.”

Elfreth said the commission hopes to have a new executive director by early next year. But she also hopes that Swanson will be willing to take calls to share her “treasure trove” of knowledge about Bay issues.

In her farewell address Oct. 11 to the governors and EPA administrator on the Chesapeake Executive Council, Swanson presented a bar graph showing how nitrogen reaching the Bayhad declined about a third since the 1980s, when she began her career. Over the same time, the watershed’s population grew by half, increasing the amount of polluted runoff and decreasing forests and wildlife habitat.

“In my really low days, I would say to my husband, ‘You know what my tombstone is going to say? It’s going to say, ‘she died holding the line.’ But what I want to point out is that I came here in ’83 and the line was here,’’ she said pointing to the taller bar on the graph. “So my tombstone will not be, ‘She died holding the line,’ because you have brought [the line] down.”

“But,” she concluded, “you need to do more.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Filed Under: News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Chesapeake Bay Region Loses Ground to Increase Tree Canopy

October 11, 2022 by Bay Journal Leave a Comment

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Looking at the skinny elm sapling reaching for the sky in his backyard, James Bryant said that he hopes he lives long enough to be able to sit under its canopy and read a book in summer.

Bryant’s neighborhood in Charlottesville, VA, has the dubious distinction of being the hottest in town. Walking the blocks around the intersection of 10th and Page streets, it’s easy to see why — trees that could offer some shady relief from the broiling summer sun are few and far between.

“We couldn’t sit out until late evening to have cookouts because it was so hot,” he said.

Like many communities across the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Charlottesville and its nonprofit partners are trying to change that. Bryant has a new crape myrtle in his tiny front yard and a pair of nascent shade trees out back, courtesy of volunteers with the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards. This fall, the city’s Tree Commission is going door to door in the neighborhood looking for at least 20 more homeowners willing to have trees planted in their yards.

Despite such efforts, the city is losing mature trees faster than it can plant new ones. Across town, pink and orange surveyor’s tape hangs from dozens of large trees in an 8-acre woods that a developer plans to clear to build 47 new homes. Another 12-acre woodland nearby was rezoned earlier this year, also for housing development.

“Rather than robust and flourishing, Charlottesville’s overall tree canopy continues to decline at an accelerating rate,” the Tree Commission warned last year. From 2014 to 2018, the city lost nearly 80 acres of leafy canopy, a 3% reduction, a new set of data show.

Charlottesville is far from alone. The new figures, compiled by scientists working as part of the state-federal Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort, show that communities in the Bay watershed cumulatively suffered a net loss of more than 29,000 acres in urban tree canopy during that time span.

Those losses come despite a pledge made in 2014 by all of the Bay watershed states — Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia — to increase their overall urban tree canopy by 2,400 acres by 2025.

Evidence that urban tree canopy is going in the wrong direction comes from aerial surveys conducted in 2013–14 and 2017–18, which were analyzed by the Chesapeake Bay Program and the nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy. Two-thirds of the watershed’s communities — cities, towns and villages, but also unincorporated clusters of homes recognized as “places” in the U.S. Census — lost tree cover. The rest held steady or registered mostly small gains.

Those losses are part of a broader canopy decline that extends into rural areas, the survey data found. But urban tree cover declines are of particular concern, experts say, because trees in developed areas not only prevent polluted runoff but reduce extreme heat and fight air pollution. They also reduce flooding, lower energy bills, raise property values and dampen noise, among other benefits.

Development takes a toll

The reasons for the decline are manifold. Diseases and pests, such as the emerald ash borer, are killing many mature trees. Ice and wind from storms fell others. Property owners take down other trees because they’re seen as hazards to property or safety, or they’re just inconvenient.

“There are so many different forces that are whittling away at the canopy,” said Julie Mawhorter, Mid-Atlantic Urban and Community Forestry Coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service.

Some losses have even occurred, ironically enough, in an effort to improve the Bay’s water quality. Stream restoration projects undertaken to reduce bank erosion and nutrient and sediment pollution often require sacrificing mature trees overhanging the water.

But the major cause of canopy declines is development, the aerial surveys showed. Woodland oases next to or surrounded by concrete and asphalt are cleared for new homes, warehouses and other buildings, while trees also come down for roads, power lines and pipelines.

When grouped by state, Maryland communities suffered the biggest declines in tree cover, losing a total of 14,592 acres for a 2.2% decrease in cumulative canopy, according to a Bay Journal analysis of Bay Program data. Virginia’s communities collectively lost 9,955 acres, for a 1.3% decrease. Pennsylvania lost 3,256 acres or 0.7%.

The community with the biggest loss was Virginia Beach, that state’s most populous city. It lost more than 1,700 acres — more than three times the next biggest decline, which occurred in Brandywine, a growing unincorporated area of Prince George’s County, MD.

“When you have older trees, they do fail during storms, and they do die,” said Brooke Costanza, Virginia Beach’s city arborist. “And we think private property owners are cutting trees on their property because they’re scared of storm damage.”

The biggest gain, with a 268-acre increase in canopy, was in tiny Mount Vernon, an unincorporated village in Somerset County, MD, whose census-drawn boundaries encompass broad swaths of timberland.

Top 5 tree canopy losses

  1. Virginia Beach, VA: 1,722 acres
  2. Brandywine, MD: 502 acres
  3. Waldorf, MD: 493 acres
  4. Accokeek, MD: 483 acres
  5. Potomac, MD: 472 acres

Source: Chesapeake Bay Program

Top 5 tree canopy gains

  1. Mount Vernon, MD: 268 acres
  2. Eden, MD: 242 acres
  3. Cambridge, MD: 180 acres
  4. Salisbury, MD: 130 acres
  5. Lexington Park, MD: 124 acres

Source: Chesapeake Bay Program

Overall, large cities lost 1.9% of their canopy in just four years, nearly three times the decline seen in small towns, though there were small gains in the watershed’s two largest municipalities, Baltimore and Washington, DC.

The new figures also seem to underscore longstanding racial inequities in urban landscapes. The percentage of tree cover in the 112 communities where Black residents make up 50% or more of the population declined on average 11 times more than other places. Baltimore as a whole was an exception, increasing its overall canopy by about 100 acres.

Such findings are significant because many predominantly Black neighborhoods already had a tree deficit, a legacy of historic housing segregation that often consigned them to cramped, relatively treeless environs.

Baltimore and Richmond, for example, were among more than 200 U.S. cities subjected for much of the 1900s to “redlining,” the federally promoted practice of withholding home loan approvals from racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

Tree-starved neighborhoods

Though outlawed in 1968, redlining’s legacy lives on in many places, including Richmond’s Southside area. The most glaring evidence of the decades of disinvestment can be seen in the predominately Black community’s lack of trees. Research led by the Science Museum of Virginia has found that the resulting “heat islands” can be up to 16 degrees hotter than leafier parts of the city, putting Southside residents at far greater risk of heat-related illnesses and death.

Sheri Shannon wants to change that. She is one of the founders of Southside ReLeaf, a nonprofit that seeks to promote environmental justice by adding and improving green spaces.

“Planting trees is not going to solve environmental racism,” Shannon said. “It’s not going to solve the climate crisis, but it is one part of mitigation of lowering the temperature in neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by extreme heat.”

Arthur Ashe Boulevard in Richmond, shown here in 2019, experiences the urban “heat island” effect, with fewer trees and more impervious surface.Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program

The centerpiece of the effort is the Greening Southside Richmond Project, a partnership with other environmental groups to plant hundreds of trees while training local youths in green industries.

“We’re focused on making sure we’re improving the green infrastructure, which will eventually improve the social infrastructure of neighborhoods,” Shannon said of the initiative, which received a $230,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to support the work into early 2023.

But it’s an uphill battle, she admitted. Developers are bulldozing tracts of trees, and she contends that they are not required to adequately compensate for the losses.

“Essentially, what we’re seeing is a lot of multifamily housing going up, which is needed, but we’re not seeing trees being planted and mature trees being preserved — and in an area that is already experiencing extreme heat and floods because of poor infrastructure,” Shannon said.

Money for planting trees

Amid growing recognition of trees’ value in restoring the Bay and battling climate change, nonprofit groups and governments at all levels are stepping up efforts to get more roots in the ground. Many are also trying to address historic inequities in the distribution of trees throughout their communities.

In Maryland, lawmakers last year passed the Tree Solutions Now Act, which calls for 5 million trees to be planted statewide by 2031. The legislation specified that at least 500,000 of those trees go in “underserved areas.”

In June, the state’s Board of Public Works gave $10 million to the Chesapeake Bay Trust to fund the first year of plantings in relatively treeless communities. The trust promptly handed out $7.7 million of that to nearly three dozen state and local agencies, nonprofits and community groups. Grants ranged from $9,000 to $1.9 million. Those funds should pay for planting 40,000 trees by next spring, said trust director Jana Davis. They’ll have to pick up the pace in future years, though, to reach the state’s 2031 goal.

Formerly a stretch of bare concrete, this sidewalk in West Baltimore was planted with shrubs and trees in 2019.Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program

Federal money is also on the way to boost urban tree plantings in the watershed. The Inflation Reduction Act will provide $1.5 billion nationwide over the next 10 years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s urban forestry program — a fivefold increase from its current funding level.

But the overall rate of tree losses has been so great that even doubling or tripling plantings won’t close the gap by itself, experts say.

“You can’t plant your way out of it,” said the Forest Service’s Mawhorter, who coordinates the Bay Program’s urban tree canopy effort. “If you want to use trees for climate resilience and these Bay goals, you also need to be paying attention to your existing canopy and how you maintain it.”

Money alone won’t fill in holes in urban tree cover, either. It’s no simple matter finding suitable spots for planting in some densely built neighborhoods. Houses around 10th and Page streets in Charlottesville hug the street on lots that are much smaller than average. Front yards aren’t big enough to accommodate big shade trees, so backyards often offer the only alternatives.

‘Fill in the gaps’

James Bryant’s neighborhood in Charlottesville is one of those urban “heat islands,” where the tree canopy is less than half the citywide average of 40%. The historically Black neighborhood has one of the city’s highest rates of heart attacks, heat stroke and asthma, according to Peggy Van Yahres, chair of the city’s Tree Commission. Most families there pay up to 20% of their income for heating and cooling.

The commission helped launch ReLeaf Cville, a project aimed at improving health and living conditions in neighborhoods with skimpy canopy, starting with 10th and Page. They have already planted about 30 trees there and helped train a group of teens to canvass the area for more homeowners.

“We’re going to fill in the gaps,” Van Yahres said.

In Baltimore, you first need to make some gaps. The only way to plug trees in some treeless neighborhoods is to carve holes in the concrete. Just 28% of the city is shaded by trees, with as little as 4% canopy in some blocks.

Wearing headphones to dampen the deafening noise, Malcolm Wilson, restoration crew leader for Blue Water Baltimore, guided a wheeled rotary saw nicknamed “Big Baby” as it carved through the concrete walk on North Smallwood Street in West Baltimore.

Crew member Corbin Sulton then climbed into a skid loader fitted with a big steel punch to break up the cut-out patch. His next step was to grab the slabs with an excavator and hoist them into a nearby dump truck.

Next spring, Blue Water Baltimore plans to plant cherry, redbud and other hardy saplings in the newly created sidewalk pits. With limited exposed ground to soak up rainfall, the young trees face challenges getting established, so the group plans to water and check on them for two years.

“If we could plant this block top to bottom and have only two or three trees die, then we’re winning,” said Wilson, who called blocks like this one “hidden gems.”

“In the long run,” he added, “it’s going to create shade [and] draw enough [pollution] out of the air. It’s going to draw some of these people out so they’re actually sitting on their steps.”

Reggie Parker, one of the few sitting out to watch the crew work, can hardly wait.

“We need some type of shade here,” he said as he perched with his cats on the sill of his open front door. He said he hoped the trees would also “bring some more birds into the area.”

Baltimore is one of the bright spots, along with Washington, DC, that has bucked the statistical trend of large and more diverse communities losing canopy. Baltimore’s tree cover grew by about 1%, or more than 100 acres, according to the Bay Program data.

The city and its nonprofit partners have planted about 13,000 trees since 2016, according to Sam Seo, director of Tree-Baltimore, a city-run umbrella group. It has also begun to perform proactive pruning of mature trees to improve their chances of surviving storms.

The nonprofit Baltimore Tree Trust has been planting about 3,000 trees a year and intends to double its pace in 2023, according to CEO Bryant Smith. Within a few years, he said he hopes to be planting 10,000 trees annually.

But Baltimore’s goal is to get 40% of the city shaded by trees by 2037, so there’s a long way to go.

“If we’re only doing 10,000 [a year], we’re not going to get there,” said Erik Dihle, who retired earlier this year after a decade as the city’s arborist. To reach the goal in time would require boosting that rate by 2.5 times, he estimated.

Besides pests and storms, some of the biggest threats to Baltimore’s tree canopy have come from infrastructure projects, including a new natural gas pipeline cutting through the forested wilderness of the city’s Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. Several stream restorations and sewer rehabilitation work have mowed down swaths of trees as well.

Weak tree protections

In many, if not most, communities, the vast majority of trees are on private property. That, experts say, is the Achilles’ heel of the effort to expand the urban canopy.

“In general, the local policies to prevent loss are pretty weak across the watershed,” Mawhorter said. “Maryland has the strongest laws, but in Maryland we’ve also had a lot of losses.”

Maryland’s Forest Conservation Act, first passed in 1991, requires developers to spare large “specimen” trees and those bordering streams and wetlands. They’re also obligated to replace at least some of what they cut down.

But the law only applies when about an acre or more is to be cleared, and it allows developers to pay to preserve trees elsewhere rather than plant replacements. Several Maryland counties and Baltimore city have in recent years imposed stricter limits, but it’s too soon to gauge their effectiveness.

Virginia has a pair of laws that aim to conserve and replace trees, but until recently they only applied in the suburbs near DC. The tree replacement law, which has expanded statewide, actually limits how much localities may require developers to replant, according to Peggy Sanner, Virginia director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

“We don’t have very strong private [tree] regulations, other than what’s given to us by the state,” said Matt Alfele, a Charlottesville city planner.

In Pennsylvania, municipalities can form shade tree commissions. They also can regulate tree removal along streets and even in some development situations. But relatively few have gone that far, said Harry Campbell, advocacy director in the Bay Foundation’s Harrisburg office.

The emphasis there, as in other states, is on appealing to private landowners to voluntarily keep trees and replace those that get taken down.

Takoma Park, a small Maryland city in the DC suburbs, has perhaps the strongest legal protections for trees on private property in the Bay watershed. A permit is required to cut down any tree with a trunk that measures more than 24 inches around, and only dead or hazardous trees can be taken down without being required to plant replacements or pay a hefty fee.

Marty Frye, Takoma Park’s urban forester, said five permit applications were denied last year. Even so, because of widespread die-off from extreme weather and pests, he said he has approved 500–600 removals each of the last two years. And with small young trees replacing big old ones, the city’s leafy canopy continues to shrink.

With the tree canopy declining faster than new trees can take their place, the Forest Service’s Mawhorter said she doubts Bay watershed states can dig themselves out of the hole they’re in and increase total tree cover by 2,400 acres by 2025.

“We’re going to have to reassess,” she said. “Is this the right goal? And if it is, what’s it going to take to get there?”

by Timothy B. Wheeler & Jeremy Cox

Filed Under: Eco Homepage, Eco Lead, Eco Portal Lead

Maryland’s Environmental Chief put on Defense in Hearing on Enforcement Lapses

January 21, 2022 by Bay Journal

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Maryland’s environmental chief vowed to make immediate reforms at his agency as he faced sharp questions Jan. 18 from state lawmakers frustrated with its performance over the past year.

Members of the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee pressed Ben Grumbles for answers on the state’s shortage of drinking-water system inspectors; the lack of penalties handed down to chicken farms that run afoul of pollution controls; the agency’s failure last fall to warn of a sewage spill before more than two dozen people fell ill from eating contaminated oysters; and two separate instances in which major pollution violations went unnoticed until watchdog groups gathered evidence and reported their findings to the state.

Valley Proteins stream cleanup
At Valley Proteins’ poultry rendering plant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, workers clean up sludge that was discovered in a stream leading to the Transquaking River. (MD Department of the Environment)

Democratic Sen. Paul Pinsky, the committee’s chair, said the revelations suggest a pattern of disregard for the public’s wellbeing on par with the federal Food and Drug Administration’s oversight failures that contributed to the nationwide opioid epidemic.

“One of the issues that comes out consistently is it wasn’t an issue of the FDA controlling Big Pharma but Big Pharma controlling the FDA,” Pinsky said. In Maryland’s case, he said he wants to make sure that the Department of the Environment is “controlling the sector that they are supposed to protect rather than that sector controlling them.”

Grumbles pledged to push forward several changes, including hiring dozens of new staff members in the Water Supply Program and significantly increasing the number of inspections conducted at chicken farms this year.

The MDE secretary also took personal blame for the agency’s belated order in November to shut down shellfish harvesting in St. George Creek in St. Mary’s County after a sewage spill. The local water and sewer utility followed protocol by immediately reporting the overflow of more than 25,000 gallons of diluted but untreated sewage, officials say. But the MDE failed to formally act on the information for more than two weeks.

In the meantime, a St. Mary’s oyster farm had unwittingly harvested more than 7,000 oysters from its leased bottom in the creek and sold them. As a result, 27 people in Virginia reported getting sick after eating the raw oysters.

“I accept responsibility for a breakdown, the failure in communication,” Grumbles said. “Our enforcement people were aware of and noted the spill, the infrastructure leakage problem. It didn’t get properly communicated to the hard-working folks who run our Shellfish Sanitation Program.”

The agency has since taken steps to make sure that a similar mistake doesn’t happen again, he added.

A common refrain during the nearly two-hour hearing was that the agency’s enforcement divisions are understaffed and overworked.

A consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted an analysis of the MDE’s workload, finding that its drinking water inspectors conduct approximately 240 inspections per year, nearly four times as many as their peers typically do in other states. At the time of the analysis, there were 27 vacancies out of a staff of 71 full-time positions.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh contended that the lack of staff has contributed to another problem: a decline in the number of certified operators at the state’s 3,300 public drinking water suppliers. The analysis, conducted by the business consulting firm CADMUS, found that 72% of water systems had a certified operator in 2020, down from 84% in 2015.

The state was supposed to submit its response — which the EPA called a “resource investment plan” — in October. But Frosh said it has failed to do so, leaving the public in the dark about what measures the state agency intends to take. Grumbles later told the committee that the MDE has turned in “phase one” of the plan and is currently working on the second.

The situation is so dire that the state risks being ceding responsibility of its drinking water program to the federal government and losing the $21 million in federal contributions toward running the program, CADMUS warned.

“This is an embarrassment to the state,” Sen. Clarence Lam, a Howard County Democrat, said. “It’s like the department is barreling down the highway at full speed with four flat tires.”

Grumbles said that much of the decrease in staffing was caused by a “silver tsunami” of retirements during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The MDE has since brought the program’s staffing level up to 68 people, with the goal of reaching 102 in the coming months. CADMUS recommended 126.

A similar staffing shortage plagues the agency’s oversight of the Eastern Shore’s chicken industry, critics say. An Environmental Integrity Project report last year found that state inspectors are visiting fewer farms than they once did, falling from an average of 218 a year from 2013 through 2017 to 134 per year from 2018 through 2020, with that decrease predating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Grumbles promised to add two inspectors to the current staff of three and increase the number of inspections by 50%, drawing praise from the group that authored the report.

“This is good news for the Chesapeake Bay that MDE will be increasing its inspection staff and has pledged to significantly boost its inspections of the poultry industry,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. Schaeffer, the former director of civil enforcement at EPA, also testified during the hearing. “However, more needs to be done,” he added, “including more routine penalties for chronic violations of pollution control laws to protect waterways and public health.”

One of the ways that MDE will accomplish the increase in inspections will be to conduct “video inspections,” Grumbles said. Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat, questioned whether such a system would work, saying that farmers could simply “show what they want to show” with their cameras. Grumbles responded that MDE staff would direct farmers in real time on what to shoot.

Senators also sought explanations for why environmental groups — and not MDE inspectors — brought to light recent pollution violations at a pair of Baltimore sewage treatment plants and at a chicken-rendering facility in Dorchester County. “We have enough humility to recognize that we’re not the only eyes and ears in the field,” Grumbles told the committee.

But his detailed defense of his agency’s recent actions rang hollow with at least one lawmaker.

“At the end of the day when we pass laws, it’s the law-enforcement entity whose responsibility it is to enforce those laws,” said Sen. Mary Washington, a Baltimore City Democrat. “We continue to hear these statements that seem to suggest that you have intention, that you’re making best efforts and maybe you accept responsibility. But it’s only after getting caught.”

by Jeremy Cox

Filed Under: News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

Headed for Hurlock: The Rhythm of Chesapeake Migrations by Tom Horton

January 19, 2022 by Bay Journal

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Because I hail from nearby Federalsburg, I can confidently describe the little village of Hurlock on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as unprepossessing, nothing remarkable, special for nothing much.

No reason, it would seem, ever to head for Hurlock.

Even within Dorchester County, which contains it, Hurlock’s flat farmscapes pale before the untrammeled gorgeousness of the great Blackwater marshes and the Choptank, Transquaking, Chicamacomico, Honga and Nanticoke rivers that lavish voluptuous meanderings on other county towns.

And yet, it is to Hurlock — specifically to the sprawling impoundments of its sewage plant — that every late autumn I head with my university classes around sunset to experience one of the great festivals of the Chesapeake Bay.

Gathering there nightly to rest, after foraging far-flung fields and wetlands, are hundreds of tundra swans, thousands of snow geese and Canada geese, squadrons of assorted ducks — all of it a delight for the eye and the ear. And that’s just for starters, I tell the class.

From 4,000 miles away, from across Alaska’s North Slope, the Bering Sea and the Yukon Territory the swans have come; the geese arrive from Labrador and Hudson Bay, and the ducks from prairie potholes as far off as Saskatchewan in Canada.

What a grand assemblage, as the western horizon fades from deep violet to black and the mellow, haunting halloooing of swans pierces the chill: Drawn from across the continent, the swans are headed for Hurlock. Having ridden the coattails of big northwest blows, they were likely airborne for 24 hours or more on the final leg of their journey.

It’s a bit of a conceit, this “headed for Hurlock” thing, because migrating waterfowl distribute throughout the great estuary. But I love how these hemispheric processions of life grace and enliven the humblest spots of the Chesapeake watershed.

I recall decades ago, exploring with my young daughter a tidal rivulet trickling from around Hurlock to Marshyhope Creek, the main tributary of the Nanticoke River. Pushing upstream in spots no more than a few feet wide were tiny wrigglers, baby eels returning from the Sargasso Sea, far out in the Atlantic Ocean, where all eels in North America go to spawn and die.

It remains more mysterious than the moons of Jupiter just why and how the eels do that, or how their spawn return. It is a remarkable journey, Abby understood, and she asked why they traveled so far.

Well, it’s obvious, I told her: They are headed for Hurlock.

We talked about how when I was a kid, schools of alewife and blueback herring thronged these little creeks every April, and how we spent cool spring evenings, campfires lit on the streambanks, dipping the silver fish for their fine-textured roe,  salting their flesh in crocks for pickling later on.

The herring spend most of their lives in the continental seas from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, converging annually to spawn on Chesapeake tributaries where they were born.

Headed for Hurlock. These glad phenomena of migration lend ritual and rhythm, beauty and nourishment to the most nondescript spots — shad returning in April, ospreys in March, great blue herons in February, striped bass in May, monarch butterflies passing through in October. All of these comings and goings embroider the great estuary richly, weaving it into a larger context: the Bay migration-shed.

These far travelers evoke the word synecdoche, the Greek origin of which translates as “simultaneous understanding.” Migrations imply that a returning swan or duck or osprey is more than just a lovely creature, about more than just itself.

As the presence of brook trout in a stream betokens a whole watershed in natural enough shape to foster the very cleanest, coolest water, so the return of swans to Hurlock means that any number of way stations on the birds’ long journey remain good and natural. It also means that we have a responsibility to steward our portions of the route.

So, when I head for Hurlock with my students, we are looking not just for waterfowl but also for annual proof that wider webs of habitat along their way remain intact. The mellifluous swans, the raucous gaggles of geese, the sassing ducks, all of these are mere entry points, entangling the Chesapeake’s 64,000 square mile watershed in a vaster realm.

These annual comings and goings conjure up fundamental rhythms of the Bay itself. Tides moving in and out daily, the constant two-layered movements of fresher, lighter river water flowing south on top as heavier, saltier oceanwater licks north along the Bay’s bottom. Geologically, the Ice Ages drew the oceans back into their basins as glaciers swelled, leaving just a river valley where the Bay was. Then there were brief flowerings of estuaries when warmer interglacials melted the ice and the seas gorged every nook and cranny of the coastlines. Deflating with the ice ages, swollen with the interglacials, our Chesapeake “migrates” to a geologic cadence, water making love to the land.

The landscape joins in, too, autumnally inhaling swans and geese and ducks from across the continent and exhaling them back every spring, and beckoning spawning fish from the coastal seas to thrust up every river, celebrating spring, jazzing the watershed with new life.

So, apologies for having a little fun with Hurlock, where I’m headed this very afternoon. It is not just Hurlock, but a synecdoche, both a humble glimmer in the vaster Chesapeake scheme of things and a critical nexus in the ensorcelling web of life.

By Tom Horton

Filed Under: Eco Homepage, Eco Portal Lead

After Two Years, Consensus on Oyster Policy Still Elusive in Maryland

January 18, 2022 by Bay Journal

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It’s hard to come together over oysters in Maryland. Two years ago, seeking to get past seemingly endless conflicts between environmentalists and watermen, Maryland lawmakers ordered fisheries managers to try a more consensus-based approach to managing the state’s oyster population.

In a bill passed over Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto, the General Assembly directed the state Department of Natural Resources to work with scientists and help the DNR’s oyster advisory commission come up with ideas for rebuilding the oyster population while maintaining a sustainable harvest. Any recommendation would have to be supported by 75% of the panel’s members.

After meeting more than two dozen times, the DNR panel reported Dec. 1 that it had agreed on 19 recommendations — only one of which called for doing anything different about oyster management. That one urged the state to invest $2 million a year over the next 25 years to restore oysters in Eastern Bay, once a source of bountiful harvests, but which hasn’t been productive for the last two decades. The other recommendations called mostly for more shell or substrate to restore or replenish reefs, plus more research, data collection and evaluation of existing management practices.

“I think everybody was hoping for a little more consensus,” said Anne Arundel County Sen. Sarah Elfreth, a chief sponsor of the oyster management law and a member of the DNR advisory panel.

Hogan, in vetoing the bill, had argued that it would interfere with the oyster management plan the DNR had updated in 2019 and foil progress made in bridging disagreements. But the approach lawmakers spelled out in the 2020 law followed the format of more limited negotiations that had forged an agreement between watermen and environmentalists over oyster management in the Choptank and Little Choptank rivers on the Eastern Shore.

That effort, called Oyster Futures, produced a series of recommendations, some calling for changes in harvest rules and others proposing new restoration initiatives.

But the DNR commission’s oyster policy review was handicapped, participants agreed, by having to hold most of its meetings virtually. Some members, particularly watermen in rural areas of the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, had difficulty getting online or being able to participate.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and member of the advisory panel. “We never got to the point where we could ever truly give and take — give on some harvest advancements in exchange for some ecological gain.”

The lack of in-person meetings prevented commission members from getting to know each other and understanding other points of view.

“We never ate together. We never chatted together,” Swanson said. “We’d come into a supercharged three-hour meeting, and so the conversations that you have that instill trust didn’t happen.”

The commission had plenty to talk about. A team of scientists from the DNR and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science analyzed the likely results of more than 70 different options for adjusting oyster management and restoration policies and practices.

Michael Wilberg, a member of the UMCES team, said computer modeling of various scenarios had helped the Oyster Futures group work through their differences. But the statewide review was hampered, he said, by the meeting handicaps and a fixed deadline for delivering recommendations to the governor and legislature.

“One of the important parts of this process is for people to propose new ideas and see us go out and try them and bring them back to the group,” he said. “That gets people talking to each other rather than trying to go around each other.

“I don’t feel we got quite to that level,” he added. “The group was just trying to get there, but we just ran out of time.”

Even so, Allison Colden, fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the computer modeling identified at least a couple of “win-win” scenarios that she thought could be the basis for agreement. But, she said, “we ended up with a result where we really didn’t come to consensus on anything with regard to making forward progress on oysters.”

A couple of the policy scenarios run through the computer model did project increases in oyster abundance and harvests alike, with more shells available to replenish worn-down reefs, Wilberg said.

“The problem I think people had … was how expensive they were,” he said. To achieve that modeled result, the state would need to invest about $20 million a year, he said, or 10 times what it spends now, to replenish reefs with recycled oyster shells and hatchery-spawned juvenile oysters.

Watermen likewise expressed frustration.

“I’m not real happy, but we’re moving,” said Robert Brown, Sr., president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. He and others had argued that all the state needed to do was return to its longstanding practice of replenishing reefs with oyster shells and allowing watermen to transfer juvenile “seed” oysters from the Lower to the Upper Bay. Computer analysis didn’t support that, though.

Despite the commission’s near gridlock, watermen said the oyster population appears to be rebounding on its own, after two summers of good natural reproduction.

Wilberg agreed that there are signs that after decades of ups and mostly downs, the oyster population could be starting to stage a strong recovery. But oyster reproduction is uneven in Maryland’s portion of the Bay, he noted, and the ability to rebuild the stock is limited by the loss of many of the reefs that used to sustain the population.

“It’s possible that the future looks really rosy,” he said. But the model indicates that if current management practices continue unchanged, he added, “it looks like we should expect a slow decrease in the future, mainly because of the loss of [reef] habitat.”

As the last commission meeting ended, DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio, who two years ago had called the legislature’s action “misguided,” strove to put the outcome in a positive light.

“I think that they did better than we expected,” she said, adding that members had worked through “incredibly hard circumstances.”

“We still have a lot of work to do,” she concluded, “but the fact that they were able to agree on some things is a great start.”

By Tim Wheeler

Filed Under: Eco Homepage, Eco Portal Lead

Bay Ecosystem: Looking Ahead on State Agendas

January 16, 2022 by Bay Journal

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As lawmakers in Chesapeake Bay watershed states convene in the new year, a variety of environmental issues are expected to come up for debate — some new, others revived from previous sessions. Here’s a legislative preview for 2022.

Maryland

Climate action, environmental justice and increased funding for Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts are among the top environmental issues facing lawmakers in their 2022 General Assembly session, which begins Jan. 12 and runs through April 11.

Environmental advocates are hoping that this year the third time really is the charm for climate legislation. Last year, the state House and Senate each passed bills to accelerate the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but legislators failed to iron out differences between the measures before the 90-day session ended.

This time, activists have joined forces to press for comprehensive climate action focused on renewable energy for electricity generation, transportation, and schools and other buildings. The proposed bills would commit the state to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 60% by 2030 — a 50% increase over the state’s current goal — and reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.

But the legislative package also aims to address the disproportionate impacts of air and water pollution on overburdened downwind and downstream communities, many of which have higher percentages of people of color.

“We have a tremendous opportunity this legislative session to be a leader, not only on climate, but also on making Maryland a leader on environmental justice,” said Staci Hartwell, environmental justice chair of the Maryland NAACP, in a December announcement of the coalition’s legislative platform.

In addition to providing new incentives and regulations to reduce fossil fuel use, advocates say their package would seek to address past and future inequities. It would include tax incentives, for instance, to increase access to solar energy and energy efficiency for low– and middle-income families and to prioritize equity in planning future transportation projects.

“We want to electrify buildings and cars, and we want to decarbonize the economy, and we believe we can do it without … burdening consumers,” said Del. Kumar Barve, chair of the House Environment and Transportation Committee. Advocates also hope to electrify the state’s school buses to spare children from harmful diesel exhaust as well as to fight climate change.

The climate-justice legislation could take different forms in House and Senate, but leaders say they’re committed to passing the overall agenda this year, given the United Nations’ latest scientific report warning that climate change is accelerating.

“We have no time to waste,” said Sen. Paul Pinsky, chair of the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee.

There’s another reason to feel a sense of urgency. Fall elections will seat a new General Assembly in 2023, so any bills vetoed near the end of or after this 90-day session would have to be reintroduced and go through the legislative grinder all over again. Advocates are pressing lawmakers to act early enough to override possible vetoes by Gov. Larry Hogan.

With federal fiscal stimulus funding contributing to a record $2.5 billion state budget surplus, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation hopes to see more money spent on initiatives that can help restore the Bay while also easing the impacts of climate change.

The foundation intends to press for millions of dollars more for tree planting, urban agriculture and stormwater pollution controls. The group also wants lawmakers to beef up the state’s environmental enforcement by mandating more frequent inspections and stiffer penalties for pollution violations. There are more than 300 facilities statewide that are either out of compliance or operating on outdated discharge permits, according to Josh Kurtz, the foundation’s Maryland executive director.

This year will also see another attempt at amending the state constitution to enshrine Marylanders’ rights to clean air, water and soil. Though the environmental rights amendment has failed to get out of committee in three previous years, advocates believe they’re gaining ground in their push for Maryland to join Pennsylvania, New York and other states in making a healthy environment a fundamental human right.

Legislation aimed at protecting people from so-called “forever chemicals,” which failed last year, also will get another try. It would ban the use of intentionally added PFAS compounds in firefighting foam, food packaging, and rugs and carpets.

Virginia

Environmentalists find themselves on the defense after voters last November replaced outgoing Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam with a Republican, businessman Glenn Youngkin, and handed the GOP control of the state House of Delegates.

“I think people will be mentally preparing themselves to be taking a more defensive approach,” said Narissa Turner, the climate and clean energy policy manager at the Virginia Conservation Network. “We’re hoping to maintain the gains we’ve made over the last couple of sessions.”

In this June 2020 photo, Steve Levitsky, then Perdue’s VP for Sustainability, walks through the pollinator garden that surrounds the company’s solar array at their headquarters in Salisbury, MD.  Photo by Dave Harp

After 2020 elections, Democrats held the reins of the state’s executive and legislative branches, the first time since 1993 that they had done so. On the environmental front, they used their advantage to cement the state’s membership in the Northeast’s carbon cap-and-trade program, ban Styrofoam food containers and set a 2050 deadline for the state’s two main electricity suppliers to be 100% carbon-free.

Now, Democrats cling to a 21–19 majority in the Senate as their only check on the new administration’s ambitions.

Youngkin’s actions as governor-elect — he takes office Jan. 15 — have all but confirmed environmentalists’ fears of rollbacks.

In December, Youngkin, a former CEO of a private-equity firm, announced plans to pull the state out of the cap-and-trade program through executive action. His transition office said that leaving the program, officially known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, would save ratepayers $4.37 a month, or slightly more than $50 per year.

Youngkin, however, likely cannot make the move alone, at least not without a fight. Government experts say that the carbon targets are written into state code. To change them would require an unlikely about-face by Democrats in the Senate.

If Democrats hold firm, Youngkin might still be able to sever the state’s relationship with the RGGI. As governor, he will have authority over the Department of Environmental Quality, which oversees the RGGI auction program. His administration will have to find an alternative way to reduce pollution if the emission targets remain on the books.

The Air Control Board represents another hurdle for Youngkin. It has already enacted regulations setting the program in motion. He can appoint new members to the seven-member board but not until July, when two seats are up for grabs.

Youngkin drew considerable flak from environmentalists Jan. 5 when he nominated Andrew Wheeler as secretary of natural resources. Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, was head of the Trump era Environmental Protection Agency, where he oversaw attempts to roll back federal air and water pollution regulations, including protections for wetlands and streams.

Michael Town, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, called the pick unacceptable. “This is hands down the most extreme nomination for an environmental post in Virginia’s history and the absolute worst pick that the governor-elect could make,” he said in a statement.

Democrats hold confirmation power in the Senate, and several were quick to blast Youngkin’s selection.

“I know he’s new to Virginia government and all, but [Youngkin] does understand cabinet secretaries require General Assembly approval — right?” tweeted Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax. “Some GOP legislators should have problems with this unless they’re not interested in re-election?”

Environmentalists widely praised Northam’s final budget proposal, which outlines spending over the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years. Key outlays include:

  • $100 million to Richmond, $40 million to Alexandria, and $25 million to Lynchburg to help upgrade their wastewater systems to prevent future overflows into nearby streams and rivers.
  • $286 million to the Virginia Natural Resources Commitment Fund, ensuring full funding of the state’s program to improve stormwater controls on farms.
  • $12 million to help tribal nations conserve and expand their lands, and $10 million to preserve historic sites related to Black and Indigenous Virginians.

Although Northam won’t be in office when the next budget is adopted, his proposal still matters, said Peggy Sanger, the Bay Foundation’s Virginia Executive Director. “It is certainly meaningful,” she added. “Like most bodies, you work from the document you’ve been given.”

The General Assembly convenes Jan. 12 and will run until March 12.

Pennsylvania

After a year in which only two minor environmental bills passed the General Assembly, 2022 has the potential to see several longstanding initiatives that benefit the Chesapeake Bay see the light of day.

A sapling stands in a protective cover at the site of a streamside forest planted in Pennsylvania to help protect water quality in a nearby stream. Dave Harp

For example, after 11 consecutive years bottled up in committees, a fertilizer bill has earned bipartisan support and buy-ins from commercial fertilizer manufacturers, nurseries and landscapers.

If passed, new regulations would limit the amount of fertilizer that can be applied on Pennsylvania’s estimated 2 million acres of turf grass. Commercial fertilizer placed on lawns would have to follow certain rates by licensed applicators, and enforcement processes would be set up. Labeling on fertilizer bags sold in stores would warn against overapplication, and a public education program would be funded.

One sticking point — that EPA give Pennsylvania credit for nutrient reductions resulting from the tighter controls — has been worked out.

“The language is there for this to be meaningful,” said Marel King, the Chesapeake Bay Commission’s Pennsylvania director.

Another bill that has bipartisan support is a Community Solar Bill that would allow state residents, farmers and businesses to invest in local, small-scale solar projects and earn credits on their electric bills.

Less certain are several initiatives that would significantly increase funding for agriculture conservation practices that would help improve water quality locally and in the Chesapeake Bay.

One bill would allocate $500 million from the state’s federal American Rescue Plan for farm conservation, mine reclamation, open space and recreation projects. Another would collect fees from the largest commercial users of water to raise $350 million a year, which would help fund farm conservation measures and water restoration projects.

Another new funding source would come from a bipartisan bill to create an Agricultural Conservation Assistance Program.

Several bills aim to mandate an increase in the amount of electricity generated in the state by renewable energy.

The Republican-controlled legislature also hopes to undo Governor Tom Wolf’s executive order to have Pennsylvania join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which would impose fees on utilities, on the state’s behalf, if they fail to meet goals for reducing power plant emissions.

By Timothy B. Wheeler, Jeremy Cox & Ad Crable

Filed Under: News Homepage, News Portal Highlights

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