Environmental groups plan to ask the federal government to crack down on state environmental regulators, accusing them of going easy on water pollution discharged from businesses, sewage plants, farms and developments.
The state's Waterkeepers - a network of environmental watchdogs - are expected to file a petition today with the Environmental Protection Agency charging the state Department of the Environment with "systemic failure" to carry out its legal responsibility to ride herd on water pollution piped into Maryland's rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. They say they've been driven to take such an unusual legal step out of frustration with the way the state is handling its duties to safeguard water quality.
"The bay's in trouble, and they don't seem to have the capacity to really deal with these problems diligently," said Fred Tutman, the Patuxent Riverkeeper. "What we're asking for is better oversight to help the [state] find the willpower, the spine, the ownership of the regulatory problems it's facing."
The groups' 58-page petition, prepared by the University of Maryland's environmental law clinic, calls on the EPA to require the state to tighten its enforcement of water pollution laws, or take over the enforcement itself. The groups' complaint alleges a litany of shortcomings in the way state regulators handle water pollution discharge permits, which are required of any private or public facility that is piping wastes into rivers, lakes and other surface waters. The permits typically limit the amount of pollution facilities can discharge and require them to report any problems to the state.
Dawn Stoltzfus, an MDE spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that it was "simply unfounded and baseless to say that MDE does not have the diligence or will to protect clean water."
Among the Waterkeepers' allegations:
•State inspectors visited only 20 percent of the more than 13,000 plants and businesses in Maryland with pollution discharge permits in fiscal 2008, down from nearly 90 percent the year before; plants with dozens of repeat violations, have gone uninspected for a decade or more.
•The MDE took 23 percent fewer enforcement actions in fiscal 2008 than the year before against violators of their permits; of more than 200 facilities reporting 30 or more permit violations in the past five years, the MDE took formal action against only 27.
