Environmental groups have their hopes raised
New governor’s team seen as more receptive to cause
Environmental groups are buoyed so far by the messaging coming from Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s environmental appointees, including promises to fill vacancies in the Maryland Department of the Environment and focus on enforcement against polluters, which lagged under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.
During a recent briefing before a Maryland General Assembly committee Moore’s appointed Secretary of the Environment, Serena McIlwain — who came from California’s Environmental Protection Agency — spoke about her new agency’s hiring strategy.
“In terms of a general, overall statement on how we are going to staff up, I have made it a priority that we’re going to look at the vacancies that we have,” McIlwain said. “We’re going to ensure that we have the right people in the right place.”
Deputy Secretary Suzanne Dorsey, who came to MDE during the Hogan administration, cited a McIlwain directive to focus on taking enforcement action against polluters, including stop-work orders, fines and lawsuits.
“We have important priorities — important work to do — at the Maryland Department of the Environment, and I want to start with a directive from Secretary McIlwain, which is enforcement,” Dorsey said. “We have an absolute commitment to enforcement.”
It’s a change in rhetoric from Hogan’s administration, which often discussed “compliance assistance” — helping violators clean up their act before issuing fines or other corrective action.
“After the disastrous Hogan administration, it’s great to see the Moore administration looking to hire more people at MDE,” said Tom Pelton, a spokesman for the Environmental Integrity Project.
“Now we have to follow up that encouraging messaging and encouraging pledges with actual action on the ground.”
A 2021 study by the Chesapeake Accountability Project, a coalition of groups including Pelton’s organization, found that declines in water pollution inspections, enforcement actions and staffing were especially dramatic under Hogan, though they had begun during
prior administrations. Hogan’s administration took 67% fewer enforcement actions against violators compared with that of his predecessor, Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat.
Moore didn’t address the environment directly in his first State of the State address last week, but he noted that state government “has nearly 10,000 vacancies.”
“That means needs are not being met,” the governor said. “It means timelines for licensing and approvals are closer to the 19th century than the 21st.”
So far environmental groups have been encouraged by Moore’s first budget proposal. The governor allotted funds for 67 new positions in the Maryland Department of the Environment, including 43 specifically to address a backlog of expired water-quality permits, often called “zombie permits,” by issuing updated pollution controls for facilities.
Last year Maryland legislators passed a requirement that the backlog be eliminated by the end of 2026 and required increased inspections and penalties for incompliant facilities. But the mandate came without any additional funds for MDE, instead requiring the agency to submit a report on the number of positions it would need by October 2022.
“Essentially, the agency is working on borrowed money” to cut down the backlog as of now, said Katlyn Schmitt, a senior policy analyst who has studied the issue at the Center for Progressive Reform in Washington, D.C.
MDE estimated it would need 86 new positions to comply with the new law. The law calls for the agency to request the second half of the positions in December 2023, said Brittany Marshall, a Moore spokesperson.
Schmitt said it’s been refreshing to see Moore’s administration speak openly about the agency’s staffing needs, something that wasn’t discussed much by Hogan’s MDE.
“We’ve seen a lot more — I believe — transparency from MDE in the last couple of months,” she said. “That’s something I don’t think we’ve had in a long time: a lot more clarity around capacity needs, staffing needs and budgetary needs.”
Moore’s budget also allotted funds for 24 new jobs in MDE’s Water Supply Program, focused on drinking water safety, after a 2021 report from the Environmental Protection Agency found the team critically understaffed and in danger of federal intervention.
Among other items Moore dedicated $2 million to begin a geological survey of the Chesapeake Bay bottom, $15 million for tree-planting tied to the Tree Solutions
Josh Kurtz, appointed by Gov. Wes Moore as the secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, speaks Wednesday about expectations for enhanced environmental enforcement under the incoming Moore administration.
Now Act of 2021 and 77 new positions for state parks under the Department of Natural Resources.
Meanwhile, Moore’s nominee for the Department of Natural Resources Secretary, Josh Kurtz, comes from the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, where he served as Maryland executive director.
The appointment drew cheers from the nonprofit world but concern from the state’s watermen, said Rob Newberry, chairman of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, who are worried that Kurtz’s perspective could be skewed toward environmental groups, which often call for tighter regulation of the state’s wild fisheries and boosts for aquaculture.
“The opposition of your industry is now the head of the regulatory agency that regulates your industry? That’s scary,” said Newberry, who recently helped convene a new Eastern Shore Watermen’s Caucus to fund lobbying in Annapolis.
Newberry said he’d be open to supporting Kurtz’s confirmation with assurances that he won’t favor his former employer.
During an interview with The Baltimore Sun Kurtz said he is excited about “getting back to the balance” by moving from an advocacy organization to a government agency.
“The way to be a successful natural resources manager is to work with everybody,” Kurtz said. “I learned a lot about talking to people in the advocacy space, but I think here it’s about bringing every stakeholder together.”
The turnover in the governor’s office also
changed things for environmentally minded legislators, said Del. Kumar Barve, a Montgomery County Democrat who chairs the House Environment and Transportation Committee.
“Now that we have an administration that wants to enforce the law, it’s going to be a more positive thing for us,” Barve said. “A lot of the bills that we would be putting in, we won’t be putting in because we’re going to be working more closely with a friendly administration.”
For instance, the committee might have considered a bill to push back against Hogan’s last-minute changes to the state’s vehicle emissions inspection program, which reduce the number of vehicles that need to be inspected, Barve said. But now legislators are in talks with Moore’s administration to address their concerns, he added.
It remains to be seen, though, whether Moore’s administration will reverse the declining enforcement trend with more aggressive action against polluting industrial facilities, wastewater treatment plants and poultry farms, among others.
An Environmental Integrity Project report found that from 2017 to 2020 Maryland inspectors found water pollution violations at more than half the poultry farms they inspected, but those farms were rarely fined.
In a General Assembly hearing last year, former Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles pledged to increase poultry farm inspections, in addition to staffing for drinking water.
“We want to make sure that actually happens,” Pelton said.
Environmental groups also have raised alarm about MDE’s slow response to serious maintenance problems at Baltimore’s two wastewater treatment plants, which dumped millions of gallons of inadequately treated wastewater into the Back and Patapsco rivers, filled with harmful nutrients and bacteria. The Patapsco plant remains out of compliance with its discharge limits.
Since then the department has taken steps to improve wastewater enforcement, including by implementing an “early warning system” over the past year to catch pollution violations earlier, said Lee Currey, director of MDE’s Water and Science Administration. Some pollution limits are tracked on a monthly or seasonal basis, but the warning system would provide the department with more frequent updates, Currey said.
The department also is starting to integrate into its permits a requirement for wastewater treatment plants to procure third-party engineering studies cataloging their long-term needs for improvements, Currey said. In addition, permits will require plants to increase their resilience in the face of climate change, which could increase the flow to wastewater plants because of stronger storms.
The new administration also has several key environmental decisions sitting in its lap that will inform the perspectives of environmental groups. For instance, a federal court in December invalidated a 50-year license for the Conowingo Dam issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Environmental groups say the decision offers a new opportunity for Maryland to hold dam owner Constellation Energy accountable for the pollution trapped in the Conowingo’s reservoir, which is spilling into the Chesapeake now that sediments have built up behind the dam.
That’s because it forces Maryland to revisit a 2018 certification issued to the dam, which had a host of requirements for Constellation and a $172 million-per-year price tag for the company. The state dropped that certification after legal challenges from the dam’s former owner Exelon, and the two sides came to a $200 million settlement.
During a briefing this week before a Maryland Senate committee McIlwain said the administration is in settlement talks with Constellation over the certification.
“We’re going to take that opportunity to negotiate hard on implementing the water-quality conditions that we had in the first place before we settled,” McIlwain said during a recent Maryland Senate briefing.
“[Constellation is] willing to work with us and we’re going to be working with them to deal with those issues.”