BY JACK GREER
Chesapeake Quarterly
August 2009

DARALD LOFGREN, RECENTLY TURNED 70, leans over and points to a shelf of tan-colored clay sticking out from the eroding banks of Mayo Beach. The air is humid. Perspiration dots his gray T-shirt. "Look at that," he says. "All these layers are getting exposed."

Small waves break against a few knuckles of clay that punch out of the crumbling bank, but otherwise it's all white sand here, stretching left and right, a prime stretch of swimmable beach right where the South River meets the Chesapeake. After all the creeks, rivers, and backwaters that have made the Bay so hospitable to human habitation, this strand feels more like ocean.

More here.

By Erik Michelsen
February 11, 2010
For Center Maryland

In the month since the legislative session began in Annapolis, there has already been a tremendous amount of discussion and debate about new stormwater regulations, the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and the ailing economy. Some have attempted to couch the discussion as one of jobs versus the environment. Those of us working on our rivers and the Chesapeake Bay on a daily basis recognize that’s a false choice.

One needed to look no further than the groups of watermen huddled on Lawyer’s Mall in January, asking the legislature to take urgent action to save their jobs, jobs endangered because of abysmal water quality and the continued degradation of the Chesapeake, to understand that Maryland jobs and the health of the Bay go hand-in-hand.

New regulations going forward will help to cushion the blow from the continued development of the watershed, but the environmental community agrees wholeheartedly with the building community that new revenue structures and programs need to be put in place in order that we can begin addressing the existing sources of nutrient and sediment pollution to the Chesapeake. To that end, the environmental community, in concert with a number of prominent members of the building industry, is supporting the Watershed Protection and Restoration Act that is being introduced by Senator Raskin and Delegates Hucker and Cardin in Annapolis this session.

Current estimates are that the backlog of stormwater-related infrastructure damage exceeds $20 billion statewide in Maryland. That’s almost $1 billion in increasing obligations for each county in the state. If this work is not accomplished, local jurisdictions and the state will continue to fail to meet their clean water goals and will be vulnerable to fines and other penalties from the federal government, one of which could include revoking the right to issue new permits. Now that’s something that would be bad for jobs.

Rather than delay or defer any longer, we have come together to support the creation of local, dedicated stormwater funds, that will help cities and counties better manage their stormwater, clean up our creeks, streams, and rivers, and re-invest in our failing infrastructure. By our estimates, the passage of the Watershed Protection and Restoration Act could result in over 6,500 new engineering, design, and construction jobs in Maryland on an annual basis, all in the name of clean water and a healthier Chesapeake. Why have just jobs or a healthy Bay when we can have one in the service of the other?

Erik Michelsen is Executive Director of the South River Federation.

When it rains, thousands of gallons of rainwater gush from the flat roofs of the school building, the portable classroom buildings, several nearby county buildings and the big parking lots encircling them. Instead of filtering into the immediate soil, the water hurtles through a drainpipe into Gingerville Gorge, located directly across Riva Road. The water rushes at such a high velocity, it has scoured away the land.

During rainstorms, water rushes along rooftops, sidewalks, driveways and pavements, picking up nutrients, dirt and chemicals on the way to streams that feed the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers.

But as one organizer put it, now's the time for activists to take their lemons and turn them into lemonade - to make the best of a bad situation by promoting cost-effective, well-thought-out laws.

Baltimore Sun
January 20, 2010

In his January 18th piece, "New Md. Rules on Stormwater Assailed," Tim Wheeler describes the content of a Smart Growth Task Force meeting at the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) where members of the development community came out to oppose new regulations aimed at tightening pollution control standards on re-development sites.