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November 26, 2022

The Talbot Spy

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

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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

Chesapeake Bay Region Loses Ground to Increase Tree Canopy

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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.

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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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.”

Bay Ecosystem: Looking Ahead on State Agendas

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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

From Agnes to Now: Perspectives from 50 years of Reporting by Tom Horton

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When the rains began pelting the Chesapeake Bay’s six-state watershed with a scope and intensity not seen for centuries, I was in my third month as a Baltimore Sun reporter, still learning how to craft a basic news article.

Tropical Storm Agnes, in June of 1972, threw me the biggest story I would cover in an environmental journalism career that’s lasted almost 50 years.

Agnes struck when the Bay’s fish, crabs, oysters and seagrass meadows were all spawning and flowering and at their most vulnerable. In a few days it smothered the estuary with more sediment and other pollution than it normally receives in decades.

I was too new at my Sun job to even get my name on the front page pieces I wrote. But Agnes lent me valuable perspective: how rare and unpredictable events can drive environmental change more than all of the day-in-day-out stuff you can spend a whole career thinking is “reality.” Some of the declines ushered in by Agnes persist to this day.

If our human watch is puny in nature’s grand schemes, it’s still long enough to draw useful observations. Here are some things that seem notable to me, looking back over a half a century of chronicling the Bay.

Pollution

The visible pollution from industrial discharge pipes and smokestacks has been largely controlled. Bay rivers look cleaner than when I was growing up.

Largely invisible, the Bay’s current, biggest pollutant, nitrogen, was not even recognized as a problem by state and federal environmental agencies until the 1980s. It took a lawsuit by citizens, and scientists who risked their jobs, to change this. And not until the 1990s was one of the major sources of nitrogen — dirty air — deemed a “controllable” source. Bottom line: Restoration means attending to every piece of the puzzle.

Sewage treatment has been a triumph of technology, drastically reducing pollution from human waste even as the population in the watershed has more than doubled. Along with similar techno-fixes for cleaner air, this accounts for most of the modest progress we’ve made in Bay restoration. But this has also masked the other impacts of more people and more cars, such as more paving, more deforestation and fewer wetlands. And there’s not that much juice left to be squeezed from the sewage and air solutions.

Seafood

Whether it is rockfish or crabs or oysters, you cannot manage what you cannot count. A survey that measured the yearly spawning success of rockfish, or striped bass, beginning in 1954 was key to alerting managers to an alarming decline in the 1980s. This led to a five-year fishing moratorium and current management that put rockfish on a relatively sustainable path.

Similarly, a Baywide blue crab survey began in 1990 picked up declines and gave Maryland and Virginia the proof needed in 2008 to take dramatic conservation steps. Crabs are managed fairly sustainably now.

For those things we did not count or invest with enough scientific effort — species like shad and oysters — the results were predictable: a shad moratorium since 1978 in Maryland and oysters reduced to around 1% of historic populations.

Survey, sample, monitor, measure — not sexy, so easy to cut in budgets. But no count, no manage.

Lands of the watershed

We all know that the Bay’s 40-million-acre watershed was green, mostly forested and the Bay was healthy before European colonists arrived.

But just as important, often overlooked, it was wet! This was courtesy of millions of beavers, damming and ponding, spreading and slowing the flows of water. There were also countless other natural wetlands, many drained long ago for development and farming. All that wetness sponsored bacteria that transformed polluting nitrogen into harmless forms.

We know this from Grace Brush, a Johns Hopkins scientist, who extracted sediment cores from the Bay’s bottom, analyzing what was washing off the land and living in the Bay going back thousands of years. The evidence is that wet-loving plants were much more dominant for most of the Bay’s history. For the Bay’s restoration we not only need greener landscapes, but wetter ones, too.

Agriculture remains a big pollution source, but farmers have proved to be capable of remarkable transformations, like a major shift from plowing to not plowing (conservation tillage, through which seeds are drilled into last season’s crop stubble.)

This minimizes erosion, sediment and chemical runoff and energy use. Add to it the fast-growing use of cover crops, planted post-harvest to suck up leftover fertilizer before it can run off to the Bay; new attention to soil’s organic content with an ability to store carbon; and innovative uses of animal manure to keep it out of polluting runoff.

Looking ahead, I don’t know if we will learn to feed ourselves without fouling the water. Looking back, it seems like we could.

We’ve protected close to a quarter of the Bay’s watershed from development, which seemed impossible in 1972. You weren’t even allowed to form a local land trust in Virginia then. It’s the clearest success we’ve had in my life. Globally and locally, we’re hearing aspirations of protecting half of our lands for nature, or at least in undeveloped status, a worthy and achievable goal.

Ecosystem services

Not sure I knew the phrase “ecosystem services” until the 1980s, but it’s developed bigtime during my watch. It means documenting the cleansing, filtering, buffering, habitat enriching values we get — for free — from wetlands, oyster reefs, forests, beavers, menhaden and mussels, etc., if we just let them do their thing.

We haven’t yet taken the next step seriously enough, which is to accord these services literal value, to act as if they are just as critical to our economy as cash and credit.

The future

There’s a humongous piece of the puzzle still missing — attention to stabilizing the human population, whose growth is a consequence of running our economy like it must grow without limit or face ruin. That’s like saying you have to become obese or starve, with no option to just be healthy. Prosperity without growth is the idea economically.

Finally: Climate change, scarcely mentioned in a book I wrote on saving the Bay as recently as 2003, will make doing everything mentioned earlier even more critical.

Tom Horton, a Bay Journal columnist, has written many articles and books about the Chesapeake Bay, including Turning the Tide and Island Out of Time. He currently teaches writing and environmental topics at Salisbury University.

Regulators Ease Shutdown Order on Troubled Md. Poultry Rendering Plant

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Maryland regulators have let a problem-plagued Eastern Shore poultry rendering plant resume operations two days after ordering it shut down because of pollution violations and potential wastewater releases.

Valley Proteins Inc. reached an agreement on Dec. 23 with the Maryland Department of the Environment that allowed it to restart its Linkwood plant but extends for now a ban on discharging any of its wastewater into a tributary of the Transquaking River.

Instead, the interim consent order signed by the MDE and the Winchester, VA-based company requires it to continue pumping wastewater from on-site lagoons and hauling it elsewhere to be treated. It also mandates lowering levels in the impoundments over the next 20 days to reduce the risks of leaks or overflows.

Under the order, Valley Proteins can only resume discharging wastewater to the Transquaking, a Chesapeake Bay tributary, after it has reduced lagoon levels sufficiently and can comply with pollution limits in its permit. It must notify the MDE two hours before resuming discharges and upon any other changes in its treatment operations.

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

The rendering plant is the river’s largest single source of nutrient pollution, which fuels algae blooms and reduces oxygen levels in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries below what’s healthy for fish and other aquatic animals.

Mike Smith, the company’s vice chairman, said that partial rendering operations resumed the night of Dec. 23 and that work is under way to repair and restart the wastewater treatment system at the plant.

“Once the system kicks in and treats our water properly, we will discharge again,” he said by email, adding that the company would then also “begin to run again at full production.”

The MDE had ordered Valley Proteins to suspend operations at the Linkwood facility two days earlier, on Dec. 21, after a series of inspections from Dec. 10 through Dec. 20 found multiple violations, including an illegal discharge into a holding pond, discharges of sludge and inadequately treated wastewater into a stream leading to the Transquaking and leaks and overflows from treatment tanks.

Regulators had directed the company earlier to stop discharging wastewater until its treatment system could meet pollution limits in its permit. The Dec. 21 order to suspend operations was prompted by the MDE inspector finding the company’s wastewater lagoons were nearly full.

The MDE’s inspections were triggered by drone images provided to the agency on Dec. 10 by ShoreRivers, a coalition of Eastern Shore riverkeeper organizations, which showed a discolored discharge from the rendering plant’s wastewater outfall.

Earlier this year, ShoreRivers, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Dorchester Citizens for Planned Growth notified Valley Proteins they intended to sue over pollution violations at the Linkwood plant, including repeatedly exceeding discharge limits on fecal coliform bacteria, nitrogen, phosphorus and ammonia.

The plant has been operating on an outdated discharge permit since 2006, and in September the MDE proposed new limits that would require upgrading the company’s wastewater treatment system. The state had at one time offered to provide nearly $13 million in public funds to pay for that upgrade, but lawmakers cut the amount in half. The MDE subsequently withdrew the offer and vowed to take enforcement action after finding more pollution violations there. That new permit is still pending.

In the Dec. 23 interim consent order, the MDE directs the company to hire an outside engineer and submit a plan within 100 days for improving the Linkwood facility’s wastewater treatment system. The company agreed to pay fines of $250 per day per violation if it fails to comply with any of the order’s terms.

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Md. Orders Linkwood Chicken Rendering Plant Shut Down for Corrective Actions

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Maryland regulators have ordered a shutdown of a problem-plagued Eastern Shore chicken rendering plant after a tip from an environmental group led them to discover a batch of new pollution violations there.

The Maryland Department of the Environment on Dec. 21 directed Valley Proteins Inc. to cease operations at its facility in Linkwood in Dorchester County until it can meet its wastewater discharge permit limits and reduce the risk of overflows from its storage lagoons. The MDE threatened to fine or suspend the plant’s permit altogether if it failed to comply with prescribed corrective actions.

Michael A. Smith, vice chairman of the Winchester, VA, based company, said it had agreed to a temporary shutdown until it can lower the levels of its storage lagoons and meet permit requirements.

“We are working cooperatively with MDE to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” Smith said.

The shutdown order comes after a series of MDE inspections this month found multiple problems at the facility. According to MDE inspection reports, those included an illegal discharge into a holding pond, discharges of sludge and inadequately treated wastewater into a stream leading to the Transquaking River, and leaks and overflows from treatment tanks.

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

The inspections were triggered by drone images provided by ShoreRivers, a coalition of Eastern Shore riverkeeper organizations, showing a grayish discharge from the rendering plant’s wastewater outfall, according to a letter MDE Secretary Ben Grumbles wrote to a Valley Proteins executive.

Choptank Riverkeeper Matt Pluta, a member of ShoreRivers staff, said that while doing aerial surveillance on Dec. 10, he saw “a large, discolored discharge” coming from the Linkwood facility and flowing downstream toward the Transquaking.

The MDE inspected the plant later the same day and reported it found acidic, inadequately treated wastewater being released into a stream, chlorine-treated wastewater leaking onto the ground, and foam and wastewater overflowing from another treatment tank.

The following week, more MDE inspections found waste sludge in a stream outfall leading to the Transquaking, continuing improper discharges both to the stream and onto the ground and inadequate cleanup of earlier detected leaks, spills and overflows. The MDE also found raw chicken waste on the ground. Regulators ordered the plant to cease discharges until the wastewater could be treated sufficiently to meet its permit limits.

“Chemical spills, tanks are overflowing, illegal discharges coming from all over the treatment process. It’s an absolute mess,” Pluta said of the conditions described in the inspection reports.

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

The Transquaking, which flows into Fishing Bay, a Chesapeake Bay tributary, has been classified for more than two decades as impaired by nutrient pollution. The rendering plant is the river’s largest single source of such pollution, which fuels algae blooms and reduces oxygen levels in the water below what’s healthy for fish and other aquatic animals.

In his Dec. 16 letter to the company, the MDE’s Grumbles called the Linkwood plant’s operations “unacceptable.” He said the company’s recent compliance record “indicates a pattern of improper operations and poor decision-making regarding water pollution and air emissions issues.”

Another follow-up inspection on Dec. 20 found evidence of more sludge having been discharged in recent days, despite cleanups of earlier releases and leaks. The inspector also found that the plant had stopped discharging and its wastewater lagoons were filling up, despite some of the wastewater being trucked away. That prompted the shutdown order.

Valley Proteins’ Smith said the company is complying.

“We have a plan in place to move as much of our incoming supply to other [renderers] and or landfills in the short term,” he said by email. The company also has arranged, he said, to lower the levels in its storage lagoons by trucking “treated clarified water” from them to an unnamed local wastewater plant.

Sludge from the Valley Proteins chicken rendering plant in Linkwood, MD, fouls a stream leading to the Transquaking River. (MD Department of the Environment)

“We have seen our system improve over the last few days and anticipate being able to operate shortly,” he concluded.

MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said Valley Proteins is putting together a plan for returning to operation, but he said the company’s plan would have to persuade the MDE that it will comply with its discharge limits and other permit requirements.

In April, Pluta’s ShoreRivers group joined with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Dorchester Citizens for Planned Growth to threaten a lawsuit against the company, accusing it of repeatedly exceeding discharge limits on pollutants such as fecal coliform bacteria, nitrogen, phosphorus and ammonia.

Grayish liquid on the ground that, according to an MDE inspector, leaked from a chlorine treatment chamber at Valley Proteins’ wastewater treatment plant. (MD Department of the Environment)

The plant has been operating on an outdated discharge permit since 2006, and neighbors and environmental groups have been calling on the MDE to impose tighter requirements. Meanwhile, in 2014, the company applied for state approval to nearly quadruple its wastewater output, from 150,000 gallons to 575,000 gallons daily.

In September, the MDE released a new draft permit that would tighten limits on what the company could discharge. State regulators set caps on discharges of nitrogen and phosphorus that would require the company to upgrade its wastewater treatment facility, even if it did not expand operations.

State regulators also vowed to seek “a significant financial penalty” as well as corrective actions for a series of water and air pollution violations it had documented at the Shore facility.

That represented a shift in the MDE’s approach to the rendering plant. Earlier this year, the department had planned to provide Valley Proteins nearly $13 million to upgrade the wastewater treatment system at its Linkwood facility. Some lawmakers objected to giving public funds to a private company with a history of discharge violations, and the legislature limited such grants to half of any projected cost. After finding more violations at the plant, the MDE subsequently withdrew the grant offer.

Critics of the plant welcomed the MDE’s pledge to take enforcement action. But at hearings in October and November, they demanded that the state put more teeth in the plant’s discharge permit. They called for independent monitoring of its discharges, curbs on any planned increase in the rendering plant’s operations until it corrects all deficiencies and the MDE pledges to fine and take enforcement action for any future violations.

Pluta said the latest developments add to his concerns about the rendering facility and about the state’s ability to oversee it.

“We recognize that there’s a need for this type of operation,” he said, “but if you can’t operate within the guidelines of the law, of your permit, then you shouldn’t be able to operate at all.”

Pluta also questioned whether the MDE has enough staff and resources to ensure compliance, noting that the MDE only discovered problems there after he reported seeing a suspicious discharge.

“They’ve been inspecting monthly and didn’t come up with all this stuff,” he said.

The public comment period on Valley Proteins’ draft permit, which was extended for 60 days, remains open until Jan. 14, 2022.

MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said department officials will consider all comments received in making a final decision on the company’s permit application.

But Apperson also released a statement from the MDE secretary, saying, “We are much more focused on enforcement and correcting any ongoing violations before taking any actions on a draft permit.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

After 45 Years, CBF’s Longtime Leader Reflects on the Chesapeake Bay at a Crossroads

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Will Baker never intended to become an environmental activist. He studied art in college and planned to become an architect, like his older brother. Then, one hot summer day in 1976, while he was up in a tree pruning it for a little cash, the homeowner walked outside with an iced tea in hand, looked up and asked, “Will, would you like to save the Bay?”

“And I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Semans, that would be fine,’” Baker recalled. “And he said, ‘Come into the house and talk to me when you’re finished.’”

Truman Semans, a Baltimore investment executive, was on the board of trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, then a small environmental nonprofit with a catchy slogan, “Save the Bay.” It was founded in 1967 by a group of well-heeled Maryland businessmen worried that pollution from industry, development and population growth would ruin the sailing, hunting and fishing they enjoyed in their spare time.

Semans sent Baker to Annapolis to see the foundation’s executive director for a job. He started as an office assistant whose duties included running out at lunchtime to pick up sandwiches.

Now, 45 years later, Baker, who recently turned 68, is retiring from CBF at the end of December after four decades as its leader, a tenure virtually unmatched in the nonprofit world. Over that time, the organization has grown into a regional environmental powerhouse, with a staff of 210 and about 300,000 members.

“It’s become a huge, impactful enterprise, and it was really built by Will Baker,” said Brian Frosh, Maryland’s attorney general who earlier served 28 years as a state lawmaker and one of the legislature’s leading environmental advocates.

“Everything that I worked on, and everything that was accomplished in the area of the environment while I was in the General Assembly,” Frosh said, “had the fingerprints of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation on it.”

Over the decades, CBF has helped to push through a series of laws — mainly in Maryland and Virginia— to protect wetlands and forests, require farmers to limit fertilizer use and curb waterfront development. It has advocated for tighter catch limits on the Bay’s striped bass, oysters, crabs and menhaden, while pressing for increased state and federal funding to upgrade sewage treatment plants and pay farmers to limit runoff from their fields. It has sued polluting industries and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Water Act, and it has taught legions of youngsters and adults about the Bay.

Through it all, Will Baker has been there, insisting with seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm that the Bay can be saved and, lately, that this is its best and maybe last chance, if only political leaders can muster the will.

Yet after all this time, the Bay is still not saved. In some important ways, it’s in better shape than it was 45 years ago. But it’s not back to anything like the natural bounty that English explorer John Smith found in the early 1600s.

The Bay restoration effort is at a crossroads, some say. The Bay watershed states, District of Columbia and federal government have failed three times to achieve cleanup goals they set for themselves, and they’re falling short as the 2025 deadline looms for their latest effort. An internal review by the state-federal Bay Program earlier this year warned that the region will likely fail to achieve seven restoration outcomes by the 2025 deadline. Among the efforts in deep trouble is CBF’s main focus, reducing nutrient pollution.

CBF, too, is at a crossroads, facing a generational change in its leadership at a time when environmental groups are reckoning with a legacy of White privilege and the need to diversify their makeup and broaden their mission to address the disparate impacts of pollution.

On-the-job training

That CBF would even survive, much less grow, was by no means assured when Baker took the helm in 1981. He’d been on staff barely five years when the board made him interim executive director while it searched for a new leader. After a few months, Baker decided to make a bid for the job himself. He got the nod, though some on the board wanted someone with more experience. At the time, Baker said, he had no particular environmental awareness or training for taking over a nonprofit like CBF.

“I learned on the job,” he said.

He had to learn quickly. When he took the reins, CBF was in dire straits, he said, with “a huge deficit.” Over the years, both Baker and CBF have become prolific fundraisers. Its 2020 annual report lists $38 million in revenues, more than 80% from membership contributions, gifts and grants. It boasts endowments totaling $46 million and net assets of around $120 million, according to its financial statements.

Such fundraising prowess has allowed CBF to expand its activities and establish a presence in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. It’s also underwritten construction of its LEED platinum headquarters overlooking the Bay in Annapolis and a similarly green education center near the Lynnhaven Inlet in Virginia Beach.

CBF president Will Baker participates in 2012 Bayfest, celebrating CBF’s members. (Janice Wagner Photography/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Education has been a big part of CBF’s work since its early days, when Arthur Sherwood bought a workboat, then a fleet of canoes to get schoolchildren out on the Bay so they could learn to love it. By CBF’s count, more than 1.5 million students, teachers and other adults have passed through the 15 education centers the group established in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

He said he’s been told by many people now in government, business and academia that their interest in the environment was first sparked by going on a CBF field trip.

Baker calls CBF’s education program its “best long-term investment in the future of the Bay.”

Choosing its battles

CBF’s other core activities have been lobbying for environmental protections and litigating to punish polluters or stop harmful projects.

In the early 1970s, it successfully argued that the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland shouldn’t get licensed without a federally mandated review of the facility’s environmental impacts. The foundation also sued to block an oil refinery in Hampton Roads VA, and it went after big industrial corporations like Bethlehem Steel, Gwaltney of Smithfield and Phillip Morris for violating federal and state pollution laws.

CBF has also deployed staff to lobby state legislators and members of Congress for more funding for Bay restoration, and it has pressed the case for imposing enforceable pollution reduction targets on the states through the EPA-imposed cleanup plan CBF now dubs the Clean Water Blueprint. More recently, CBF has branched out into restoring vital Bay resources that have been lost, including streamside forests, wetlands and oysters.

Baker acknowledged that he is frustrated that the Bay isn’t closer to recovery. Some Bay advocates are suggesting that it’s time to publicly acknowledge the restoration effort is going to come up short again and begin discussing a new agreement to carry on beyond 2025.

“We’ve got to look at new tools and ways of doing things,” said Roy Hoagland, who spent 22 years on CBF’s staff, seven of it as vice president for environmental protection and restoration. He and others suggest the restoration effort needs to “broaden back out” from its focus on nutrient pollution to attack other largely unaddressed problems, like climate change, growth and toxic contaminants.

But Baker contends that admitting failure now would be a “huge mistake, because to say that takes all the pressure off.”

Instead, CBF has again gone to court, joining with three Bay states and the District of Columbia last year in suing the EPA for not taking more aggressive action to make Pennsylvania do its part to clean up the Bay.

“We’re not giving up,” he said. “Every month, [meeting the 2025 goal is] less likely, but there’s no reason to give up and to say, ‘Let’s just start thinking about moving the goalposts again.’ I’m so sick of that, you know?”

The biggest challenge to fulfilling the Bay cleanup, Baker contends, has been Pennsylvania. The state’s House of Representatives has repeatedly balked at proposals for raising revenues to pay farmers to install runoff-limiting practices on their fields and feedlots. Baker calls the Pennsylvania House “as fiscally conservative as any legislative body I’ve ever worked with.”

CBF also has scrapped with commercial fishing interests as it pressed for tighter controls on harvests of striped bass, blue crabs, oysters and menhaden. Its advocacy in the 1990s for tighter limits on crabbing angered watermen, who erected a billboard on Smith Island criticizing CBF. A storage building CBF owned there was torched amid the controversy.

Conflicts with watermen have continued, at least in Maryland, where CBF successfully lobbied state lawmakers against reopening some of the state’s oyster sanctuaries for commercial harvest. CBF also pressed for legislation requiring scientific and consensus-based management of oysters to identify and curb overharvesting. That earned the group a public rebuke from Gov. Larry Hogan, who promised to look out for watermen when he was first elected in 2014.

Yet some environmentalists, particularly in Maryland, contend that CBF has gone easy on the agricultural industry, even though farm runoff is the leading source of nutrients fouling the Bay.

“What we have tried to do that some of our colleague organizations haven’t always bought in on is we have tried to get funding for agriculture,” Baker countered. CBF has “raised millions of dollars to put best management practices on farmland. And to do that you have to gain the trust of the farmer to go in and start working with him.”

Will Baker, retiring president of CBF, walks near the organization’s Annapolis headquarters with incoming president Hilary Harp Falk. Photo by Dave Harp, Bay Journal

Rethink and retool?

A growing number of Bay advocates say CBF, like many organizations of its kind, needs to address the lack of diversity within its ranks and focus more on environmental inequities. Communities of color will continue to disproportionally suffer from environmental health hazards if advocacy groups fail to call attention to it, they say.

Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman, a vocal CBF critic, contends the foundation’s size and reliance on corporate financial support keep it from pursuing the social justice needed to address environmental inequities.

“I think it has its heart in the right place,” he said, “but no concept of the stakes on the ground … If you want to clean up the Bay, you have to right some wrongs.”

Baker counters such criticism by pointing out that CBF has hired an attorney to focus on environmental justice cases. But CBF’s top management is all White, and its staff is nearly 90% White. Only 4% of the staff identify as Black. The board of trustees is more diverse, with 19% of its members identifying as Black.

“Our numbers are not where we want them to be,” Baker acknowledged. “We’re working like crazy,” he added, to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

Andres Jimenez, executive director of Green 2.0, a group that monitors diversity at nonprofit organizations, said that CBF is at least acknowledging it has a problem.

“Could they be doing better? Yes,” Jimenez said. “Could they be working faster? Yes.” But he credited CBF and Baker with being up front about the problem and seeking his advice and help in addressing it.

Change of command

On Jan. 2, CBF will have a new leader. Hillary Harp Falk, announced as Baker’s successor in late October, interned at CBF and after college worked for three years teaching students about the Bay at CBF’s Port Isabel Island center. Her budding career in conservation then took her to the National Wildlife Federation, where she advanced to become chief program officer. (She is the daughter of Bay Journal staff photographer Dave Harp.)

Many say she’s a good choice to build on what Baker accomplished and take it in new directions.

“She’s a coalition builder, a very strong communicator,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and a former CBF staffer. “In hiring Hillary, they’ve reached another generation that was really raised understanding more about diversity, equity and inclusion … and the strength of power sharing.” Whether she can woo the big donors Baker did remains to be seen, Swanson said.

Baker said that he’s doing more fundraising in his final weeks to ensure his successor can start out on a firm financial footing.

After New Year’s Day, Baker said, he plans to “sleep, read a book, you know, smell the roses.” He said his wife once told him he’s a workaholic, which he acknowledges with some chagrin. “I’ve got a couple of things on the drawing board,” he said, but he wasn’t ready to share them just yet.

Looking back, the only regret he was willing to share is that the job he signed up for is not finished. He recalled running into former Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer in downtown Annapolis shortly after the governor left office in 1995. After exchanging pleasantries, Baker said he was walking away when Schaefer called out to him. “‘I thought it would be easier,’” Baker heard him say. ‘I said, ‘Governor, what was that?’ He said, ‘Saving the Bay.’”

By Timothy B. Wheeler