The Talbot County Council held a two-hour work session on February 7th to review Lakeside. Only the Council, staff, and attorneys for the developer of Lakeside and the Town of Trappe participated substantively; even Planning Commissioners were just observers. Below is an open message delivered to the Council to provide some feedback on the record. I know that only a few readers who follow this matter very closely will grasp the details, but all should get the gist of the message:
Dear Council Members:
I would like to offer a brief comment on the Council’s February 7th work session, lest a total absence of public reaction be misinterpreted.
Every adult viewer knows that session was designed not as an opportunity to “bring all the parties to the table,” per Mr. Callahan’s introduction, to investigate and air all the issues and hear both sides with broad participation, but as a set up, so that the developer’s and Town’s attorneys could “answer all the questions,” explain the whole story, and put matters to bed.
The attorneys for Rocks Engineering and the Town were put forward as the authoritative source of information, to considerable adulation by the Council President, as video shows. There were no serious challenges offered from any quarter. As Mr. Callahan said, “it went very, very well.”
It is impossible to parse and respond adequately to a two-hour non-stop presentation of one point of view, and no one would care to read such a critique anyway, most particularly folks whose minds were made up long ago. But I believe, and I know many agree, that the presentation was a continuation of the process wherein the many actual facts were blended artfully with some misleading statements, key omissions, and slanted interpretations, swirled about, and served up as complete and accurate Truth.
The saying is true, “Trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”
Just two concrete examples, from the point when the developer’s attorney jumped back in to speak, just as Mr. Callahan was wrapping up the meeting. Not having addressed the disputed issue of the original sewer service classification, Rocks’ attorney dove into the language of the documents to help make his points. What could be more authoritative than that?
The attorney read from the CWSP and said this: “Finally, the text notes that when the land is annexed to the Town of Trappe, the area would be designated…S-1/W-1.” But the specific sentence he was referring to did not the end there; he failed to read the final ten words: “after amending the Talbot County Comprehensive Water and Sewer Plan.”
The developer’s presentation implies that the Plan itself actually says Lakeside’s designation of S-1 was to be automatic upon annexation–which is exactly opposite what the Plan expressly states. Please re-read this, both ways. The conclusion–that the developer’s presentation was/is misleading–is both clear and obvious.
That amendment to the Plan is exactly what the Town proposed to the County in Resolution 123 and that is the proposed amendment that the County Council flatly rejected 5-0 in December ’04. Thus, the actual application of that language expressly rejected the very result that Rock’s attorney implies happened automatically under the Plan as written.
A moment later, he addressed the very language of Resolution 123 itself, saying this at 1:54:47 into the session: “When you look back at the history of amendments specifically as related to Lakeside, the Town of Trappe presented an amendment to the County Council in 2004. And the County Council introduced a Resolution. The Resolution doesn’t say it’s amending the service designations of Trappe East from “Unprogrammed” to W1/S1. The County Council at that time understood the map, AND THE RESOLUTION INDICATES IT’S AN AMENDMENT FROM W2/S2 TO W1/S1.” [Emphasis added.]
What listener didn’t get it? Resolution 123 itself said the property had been S-2? Coming in the context of exact quotes from documents, what listener didn’t understand the attorney to be reading from the Resolution and that, like R281, the title, or at least the text, of R123 twenty years ago also said, “FROM S-2 to S-1?” That would certainly seem to put an end to the argument.
Please see Resolution 123 here. How could Resolution 123, the authoritative source document Rock’s attorney was referencing, indicate Lakeside was “S-2″ when the term “S-2” is found nowhere in that document, never mentioned at all? It indicated no such thing.
It is true, by the way, that the Resolution, as requested by the Town, did not say the property was unprogrammed—it said nothing at all on the topic. And, the attorney’s reference that a “finding of fact” document prepared by the County Attorney that did reference the property as S-2….but that is a different story. The artful blending of fact and error is always-misleading, illustrated I believe throughout the Lakeside approval process.
Lastly, many have lost sight of why the S-2 argument has been so belabored. It is relevant in two ways (and important enough for the developer’s attorney to want to interject it into the session even as Mr. Callahan was wrapping it up in such a favorable manner).
First, the S-2 classification in 2002 is critical if one is even to try to make the (fallacious) argument that the passage of time alone transmutes one classification to another. S-2 means “programmed for immediate priority in 3-5 years,” which apparently is the developer’s explanation as to why MDE thought it could issue valid construction permits in 2006. (That is one of the puzzles that only MDE, and not Rocks’ attorney, must answer; it was included in a list of questions delivered to MDE last week.)
That purported S-2 classification also was used as the key device to frame R281 in 2020: in effect, “the County formally designated Lakeside for development within 3-5 years long ago—18 years ago, in fact!–so obviously this needs to approved immediately with few questions asked.” If that misreporting of Lakeside’s S-2 status had not been perpetuated for so many years, that argument would have held no water and the project would have been properly considered in 2020.
But forget S-2, and forget sewer service classifications altogether. The one essential question that neither the developer’s attorney, the Town, staff or anyone else has answered in last week’s work session or at any other time is this: When, prior to its review of R281, did the Talbot County Planning Commission ever find that connecting 2500 homes and a half-million square feet of commercial space on Lakeside’s 865 acres to sewer service was consistent with the Talbot County Comprehensive Plan?
It never did so. Of course, that means the 2006 MDE permits could not have been validly issued—but the significance goes far beyond that. “Everyone” believed that finding must have happened long ago, including the Commission, the Council, and the public. (The MDE permits seemed proof, for one thing.) But it had not—Talbot County skipped a step…a critical step, the one time when all of the issues are evaluated by the entire community—schools, traffic, adequate public services, taxes, the whole nine yards. It was never done, but for the truncated 2020 review of R281 where wastewater was the only issue on the table.
If the Council wants to resolve this conflict by saying Lakeside’s approvals are proper as things stand, then it just needs to tell us the date of that pre-2020 meeting when the Planning Commission found extension of sewer to those 865 acres to be consistent with our Comp Plan. If that cannot be done, is it not an admission that something’s rotten in Denmark?
Dan Watson is the former chair of Bipartisan Coalition For New Council Leadership and has lived in Talbot County for the last twenty-five years.
The list of questions delivered to MDE last week is available here.
Video of the entire February 7th work session is available here.
Jim Smullen says
Regarding the permit violations and infiltration and inflow situation at the existing Trappe wastewater plant, the “discussion” in the February 7 meeting was scripted to express that “everybody has problems with I&I”. The President of the County Council and others said that everybody must deal with I&I, and he called upon Mr. Clarke the County Engineer to express his opinion. Mr. Clarke responded that that in fact the regional wastewater systems do indeed have to deal with I&I issues in in their sewer systems.
What none of the participants did say is that all the Talbot County Sanitary District wastewater treatment facilities were exposed to essentially the same precipitation conditions in their sewer service areas towards the end of 2020 and in the spring of last year, as were experienced in the Trappe plant service area. The county facilities also most likely experienced heightened I&I conditions during that same period. And yet none of Talbot County plants violated their pollutant discharge permits for 3-4 months. And that no doubt is because the sewerage facilities in the County system are resilient and capable of managing widely varying plant flow conditions.
The Trappe wastewater plant is based on concepts and technology that were developed in the 1970’s and used in municipal wastewater systems for the last quarter of the 20th century. It is two generations out of date with the current treatment technologies and standards, and has been in use in Trappe for more than a generation. The collection system obviously has aged and allows copious amounts of rainwater to leak in. The Trappe sewer system is not resilient to I&I conditions as was demonstrated by the 3-4 month period of violations in 2021. When audited in June by the MDE the Trappe plant operators told the MDE staff that the violations were caused by excessive I&I that had begun towards the end of 2020 and continued into 2021 until the plant began to malfunction. In retrospect the malfunction likely started sometime in January.
In the Trappe town attorney’s letter to the Planning Commission last August, she suggested an affirmative defense for the plant violations, saying that the plant upsets were caused by extreme I&I resulting from extreme rainfall. It since has been shown while the I&I no doubt was extreme, the rainfall was not extreme, but rather quite average. Again, note that the County plants reported no problems. Now it is clear that her original proposed affirmative defense cannot be substantiated. In in the Council meeting last Monday night the Trappe attorney completely dropped the I&I issue, and now stated that the problem that caused the discharge violations is that the operators “made a mistake” and drained the storage lagoons, causing the problem. And of course as the Council President pointed out at some point, anybody can make a mistake.
The story of the conditions leading to the violations is told in the report of the MDE plant audit and in related regulatory compliance documents. First of all, the lagoons were full for quite some time because the operators could not process all of the extraneous rainwater entering the collection system through the plant, and they tried to survive it in part by not engaging in regular drain down management of the lagoons for as long as possible. But they simply ran out of lagoon storage and time. But the plant already was in violation when they did begin to drain the lagoons, so draining the storage didn’t initiate the violations. And these relatively small lagoons were not drained catastrophically in some big plant accident or operator error. The gradual draining of the lagoons by plant operators likely diluted the plant bio-processes further and may have prolonged the violations. But the problem was cased by excessive I&I yielded by average wet weather conditions. The lagoons were a side issue.
Again, when MDE performed the June 2021 plant audit, they were told unequivocally by the plant operators that the permit violations were forced by inability to control and treat the inflow to the plant from the I&I. And by the way, most of the “remedial” I&I actions mentioned in the script on Monday night already had been performed by the time of the June audit, and MDE was told that they had not revealed the sources of the I&I problems.
Every few years we experience the precipitation conditions similar to those which led to the Trappe plant discharge violations in 2021. Since later in 2020, it has become abundantly clear that the existing Trappe sewer system has aged to a point where is not resilient to I&I and is destined to fail again during the next prolonged wet weather period.
The MDE should not allow the Trappe East connections to the existing sewer system until the I&I problem has been investigated and remediated to an acceptable degree, and until the plant is upgraded to incorporate modern treatment technologies. The County should recognize the problem and face up to it, and not ignore it. The connection of Trappe East to the existing plant should not be allowed at this time.
The Trappe town attorney continues in attempts to enlighten the County Council on sanitary science and engineering matters, just as she attempted in her letter to the Planning Commission last August.
In my experience, in other states and in other times, the EPA Region III permits unit, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance assurance, and no doubt the criminal investigations division, would be taking a very close look into those statements and Trappe’s affirmative assertions regarding permit compliance status.
Jim Smullen says
Since Covid started forcing us to virtual meetings back in March of 2020, I NEVER before have participated in a public meeting that had the software Chat function disabled. I have participated in public/regulatory agency virtual meetings conducted in Pennsylvania, and in New Jersey, and by the Delaware River Basin Commission, and by other municipal organizations. Many times in these meetings audio was disabled or under the control of the moderator, but I’ve never before experienced a public agency not allowing the written Chat function to remain enabled, nor have I seen an agency not record the Chat lines as part of the meeting documentation.
The conduct of the County Council special meeting last Monday night the Chat function was disabled, constituting an outrageous suppression of public dialogue and input on an important issues.
Mike McConnel says
The essential fact which neither the Council, the Talbot Planning Commission nor the public can ignore is that the Talbot Planning Commission never comprehensively reviewed Lakeside for consistency with Talbot County”s Comprehensive Plan. The explanations for this are beside the point. The Council did not have the legal authority to enact Resolution 281 without such an assessment.
The County’s land use standards and controls have been substantially ignored. They have never been given a chance to fulfill their purpose when Lakeside showed it has matter the most!
Dan’s letter ends appropriately on this note. Are we simply to stand by? Where, one might ask, was the County Attorney during this consideration? Where is he/she now? How is it that a developer can potentially build 2500 homes in Talbot County without a comprehensive determination that this squares with the County’s land use values? Go figure.
Mike McConnel
Eric Ploeg says
Mike’s comments are right on. It seems the overall scope of Trappe’s Lakeside is being overlooked. The town of Easton is now about 16,000 residents and the Lakeside project is planned for 2501 homes = about 8,000 new residents. Wouldn’t that be adding about 1/2 the entire town of Easton onto 9-10 acres of Talbot County? This creates so many challenges ahead that need to be addressed. The waste water management for Trappe is already inadequate. Dan Watson has displayed photos taken by kayakers on Trappe Creek showing the filth and slime already being discharged into the Bay from the existing Trappe waste water treatment facility. The health of our beloved Bay is at stake and there are no “do overs”! Will all the residents of the new Trappe/Lakeside enter and exit onto Rt 50 through the 1 entrance-way currently under construction? New traffic light(s)? Has public safety been addressed? Wouldn’t this warrant a new fire station, an enlarged Trappe police station? So many considerations. It appears that this project may not have been completely thought out for the betterment of the residents of Talbot County and the health of our Chesapeake Bay.
Bo flower says
Thanks Dan for your continued efforts on the behalf of all of us in Talbot county
Jill Poe says
I Do not know about denmark, but definitely something is rotten at the Talbot County Council. Maybe Talbot can annex this development to Dorcester County and tie it in with the whole Valley Protiens Mess.