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Health & Fitness

Protecting a National Treasure: The Chesapeake Bay (Part II – the Solution)

By 2025, Marylanders are expected to reduce N in their tributaries by at least 11.59 million pounds per year, P by 0.49 m-lbs/yr, and Sd by 25.82 m-lbs/yr. The EPA doesn't care how Marylanders do this – only that they do it.

SUCCESS =
1)  Maryland contributing net annual loads of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sediment that allow the Bay to meet Clean Water Act standards by 2025.
2)  Watershed businessmen and farmers remaining equally competitive with their non-watershed competitors.
3)  Public officials spending public restoration funds prudently.

MARYLAND shares a federal mandate with other Bay watershed states (and DC) to reduce its net annual inflows of Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Sediment (Sd) in order to boost levels of dissolved oxygen in the Bay. By 2025, Marylanders are expected to reduce N in their tributaries by at least 11.59 million pounds per year, P by 0.49 m-lbs/yr, and Sd by 25.82 m-lbs/yr. The EPA doesn’t care how Marylanders do this – only that they do it. This is a laudable goal, because it’s a critical step towards restoring the Chesapeake Bay to its historic productive capacity (See Part I).

Restoring the Chesapeake Bay, however, competes with other laudable public efforts such as transportation, education, safety, social services, and promoting/protecting Maryland’s private sector. So funding isn't limitless – we must apply whatever’s necessary…but no more, because it’s needed elsewhere too.

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Unfortunately, Maryland’s current approach will waste billions of dollars. Reason being: Annapolis is applying something called the “Equity Principle,” which requires emitters of N, P, and Sd to reduce comparable percentages of their emissions regardless of their comparative reduction costs. Lip service has been given to developing a nutrient trading market that would allocate conservation monies more wisely; but new restoration taxes are already being levied and justified by a mantra that essentially says, “The EPA is making Maryland spend over $14.4 billion on the Bay, and there’s nothing we can do about it – so suck it up!”

But a more sensible approach does in fact exist that would save taxpayers nearly $6 billion. This approach asks ALL Marylanders – not just those living in the watershed – to help reduce N, P, and Sd inflows by the most cost-effective means possible. There are no “bad guys” in this alternative because no one could have foreseen the damage that two naturally occurring nutrients and good “clean” mud would inflict upon the Chesapeake Bay’s ecosystem. Instead, farmers, residents, and business owners can all become willing partners in a transparently fair and effective approach. But first, let’s look at the current plan…

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THE CURRENT PLAN

In October 2012, Annapolis submitted Phase II of its Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) to the EPA, which outlines how Maryland will execute its portion of the Bay cleanup plan. Maryland’s WIP meets EPA standards by 2025 by tasking each source sector (wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), agriculture, municipal stormwater, and septic systems) with relatively proportional reductions in N, P, and Sd emissions.

One component of the WIP that makes perfect sense is spending $2.368 billion to reconfigure the State’s major WWTPs with the industry’s best available nutrient removal technologies. Applying these new technologies has already dramatically reduced the amounts of N, P, and Sd that WWTPs release into the Bay. It is money well spent!

But after calling for upgrades to WWTPs, Maryland’s WIP loses its bearings because it ignores the vastly superior cost effectiveness of applying best management practices (BMPs) such as cover crops, forest buffers, and refined nutrient management programs to agricultural operations over retrofitting stormwater systems or tearing up functional septic tanks to install newer models. 

Here’s Maryland’s $14.4 billion “Equity Approach,” along with illustrations of how much mitigation strategies vary with respect to the costs of removing one pound of N, P, or Sd (see photo).

A BETTER PLAN

·  Save $3.719 billion by canceling Maryland’s septic system replacement program. Every $216 we save by NOT removing one pound of N with septic upgrades can be spent removing 16.5 pounds of N with agricultural BMPs. And besides: septic system upgrades do absolutely nothing to reduce P and Sd loads. 

·  Reduce our extravagant $7.388 billion stormwater mitigation plan by 40%...and expand our agricultural BMP program by 50%...providing the latter with 20% more funding in order to properly compensate farmers for their conservation efforts.

·  Meet EPA requirements for N, P, and Sd load reductions AND save Maryland taxpayers $5.932 billion! (see photo)

The modified WIP described above begs the question of whether Maryland has enough “unaddressed” farmland to expand its Ag BMP Program... Well, a 2011 USDA report determined that over 3.4 million acres of Bay watershed cropland (~80%) has a high or moderate need for better agricultural BMPs. And as it turns out, much of that farmland is in Maryland (see areas in yellow in photo with map). 

OTHER LOOSE ENDS

The Rain Tax

On July 1, 2013, ten Maryland Counties began assessing wildly disparate surtaxes on their residents’ impervious surfaces. Now, numerous Maryland businesses face assessments in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars – a devastating blow for many of them. 

Next year, Maryland’s legislature needs to lower the Rain Tax to a point where it still incentivizes constructive stormwater runoff mitigation, but doesn’t harm the competitiveness of Maryland businesses. Offsets for lost revenue can come out of the $5.932 billion Maryland will save by modifying its WIP (as described above). And individual tax loads can be further lightened by extending the shared responsibility for Bay restoration to all Marylanders – not just those living in watershed counties.

Helping protect the Chesapeake Bay is something that comes along with being a Maryland citizen.  Every Marylander should be proud of being bestowed with such an honorable responsibility.

The Conowingo Dam

If we do nothing, in 10-15 years, the Susquehanna River’s greatest sediment trap, the Conowingo Dam, which prevents 70% of the river’s sediment from reaching the Bay, will be completely full. And if we allow that to happen, most of our other conservation efforts will be for naught...

Fortunately, in 2014, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will publish a response plan that will describe how the Conowingo Dam can maintain its critical sediment-trapping role indefinitely. Their plan will include details about periodic dredging operations and even “sluicing” sediment through its gates during the winter when sediment inflows aren’t as harmful to the Bay. It will cost at least $50 million a year…because there’s a lot of sediment! So we’ll need robust funding to tackle the “dirt behind the dam”… We can’t afford to be wasteful elsewhere.

Shad (Fish Lifts and Passageways) – some Good News!

In 1989, the interstate partnership “Chesapeake Bay Program” set a goal of re-opening 2,807 miles of habitat to migratory and resident fishes in the Bay watershed. Today, spawning run barriers have been removed and/or new lifts, ladders (see photo) and passageways have been installed on 2,510 miles of habitat – it’s 89.4% complete! The 2,807th mile will re-open sometime before 2016.

And just this past June, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council set a first-of-its-kind limit on the amount of river herring and shad that can be taken at sea by industrial trawlers fishing for other species. Future mackerel fleets will have to stop fishing once they catch 236 metric tons of river herring and shad – a catch limit that would have closed the commercial mackerel season early in two of the past eight years... Shad’s future is looking brighter.

Oysters

We would all love to restore the Bay’s oyster population right now! But we will be more successful over the long run if we act strategically:

We should “surge” our restoration resources after the Bay’s oysters have built up sufficient natural resistance to MSX and Dermo…and after the Bay’s water has become clear enough and oxygenated enough for them to thrive, i.e. after roughly 2025.

When the right time arrives, we should pay oystermen to skip two or three harvest seasons and focus their energies instead on restorative oyster bed plantings. By 2028 then, we should be good… And the additional taxes we will collect from a restored oyster population will be more than enough to repay us for our outputs of patience and capital. Right now, however, “throwing money” at oyster restoration appears to be a bit premature…because the Bay just isn't “livable” enough. But if we apply our limited conservation resources wisely, soon it will be...soon it will be. 

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