The Talbot Preservation Alliance made a proposal last evening to a packed crowd at the Talbot Historical Society auditorium in Easton. Over 80 people were in attendance, including the entire Talbot County Council.
The group’s proposal was developed to address their concerns that the present State WIP (Watershed Implementation Plan) draft is not only cost-ineffective, but it includes significant costs without identifying how to pay for them.
The Talbot Preservation Alliance’s alternative plan’s highlights include no new taxes, and takes zero County farmland out of production. With a focus on banning residential lawn fertilizers, and shifting cover crops and agriculture buffers, The Talbot Preservation Alliance suggests that Talbot County can meet the state mandated targets without spending anything.
The WIP process began in 2008, when the Chesapeake Bay Foundation sued the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Water Act. The resulting settlement in 2010 created a mandate for each state in the watershed to develop a plan to meet targets called TMDLs (Total Maximum Daily Load – the maximum amount of a pollutant that a water body can receive and still meet water quality standards). These TMDL targets are to be met in the year 2025, with a preliminary set of targets to reach by 2017.
In 2011, each Maryland county was asked to develop a County WIP that would address methods to reduce the nitrogen loads and how to measure that progress. Together, those plans would feed into the overall Maryland WIP. At present, the State WIP is in draft form and the opportunity for public comment continues until March 9th.
The evening’s presentation focused on Talbot’s nitrogen inputs. Basic causes of the nitrogen pollution include agriculture, wastewater treatment plants, septic systems, and stormwater runoff. Each county in the state has a different ratio of pollutants from these sources – western shore counties have larger issues with wastewater treatment and stormwater from impervious surfaces; rural agricultural counties such as Talbot’s issues surround agricultural inputs, residential lawns and septic systems.
Recently, the state shifted their strategy from asking each county to create its own WIP, to a “basin” approach. This approach asks the Eastern Shore as a whole to develop a WIP to address nitrogen inputs across the board for the entire Shore. The Talbot Preservation Alliance believes that this “basin approach” is ineffective, as there are no legislative bodies that encompass the Shore as one unit, there are no structural methods to develop such plans, and more importantly, no possible ways to determine how and who would pay for them.
The Alliance pointed out the costs listed in the state draft WIP are high. In the case of septic system costs alone the WIP calls for $800 million to be spent by 2017, in order to reduce the nitrogen load through septic systems by 321,000 lbs. And by the target date of 2025, the state WIP calls for over $3 billion – again, to meet targets for only one nitrogen source – septic systems. The point of the Alliance’s proposal was to address the fact that this draft state plan, with such high costs, is not useful and is not practical.
The Alliance proposed the following –
- Drop the “basin model” and insist on numeric, county by county targets for pollution reduction.
- Ban residential lawn fertilizers in Talbot County. Through this one measure alone, the Alliance predicts a total nitrogen reduction of 168,000 lbs/year. This would require revising a state law – the Fertilizer Use Act of 2011, which prohibits counties from adopting more restrictive lawn fertilizer legislation, or obtaining an exception to that state law. A ban on residential fertilizers would, according to the Alliance, reduce Talbot County nitrogen inputs on the non-agriculture side to well beyond the levels mandated by the state TMDL and would cost nothing.
- Use Best Management Practices (BMPS) such as increasing buffers from 25 ft to 60 ft., require “traditional” cover crops by all recipients of federal crop subsidies, and discontinue taxpayer compensation for “commodity” cover crops.
For more information about the Talbot Preservation Alliance, click here.
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