Environmental Laws

Nobody asked me, but here are my six recommendations in the matter of the highly publicized, closely watched, widely criticized, rift-causing lawsuit brought by the Waterkeeper Alliance against the Hudson family poultry farm over alleged pollution in a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's Eastern Shore: •Everybody calm down, starting with the Maryland General Assembly. Already, the House of Delegates has authorized $300,000 — taxpayer dollars — for the legal fees of Alan Hudson, the farmer.

Nobody asked me, but here are my six recommendations in the matter of the highly publicized, closely watched, widely criticized, rift-causing lawsuit brought by the Waterkeeper Alliance against the Hudson family poultry farm over alleged pollution in a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's Eastern Shore: •Everybody calm down, starting with the Maryland General Assembly. Already, the House of Delegates has authorized $300,000 — taxpayer dollars — for the legal fees of Alan Hudson, the farmer.

A recent Sun editorial, "Free pass for Md. polluters?," (Sept. 27) did not take into account all of the ways that Maryland enforces water pollution violations. Criminal prosecution is just one tool that we employ to protect public health and the environment in Maryland. Administrative and civil authority is often the more effective route to achieve compliance with environmental laws due to the high bar set by the courts for criminal enforcement. The majority of Maryland businesses and citizens comply with environmental laws, but a strong and fair enforcement program is essential to protect our investment in the environment as well as the health and quality of life of all Maryland residents.

A recent Sun editorial, "Free pass for Md. polluters?," (Sept. 27) did not take into account all of the ways that Maryland enforces water pollution violations. Criminal prosecution is just one tool that we employ to protect public health and the environment in Maryland. Administrative and civil authority is often the more effective route to achieve compliance with environmental laws due to the high bar set by the courts for criminal enforcement. The majority of Maryland businesses and citizens comply with environmental laws, but a strong and fair enforcement program is essential to protect our investment in the environment as well as the health and quality of life of all Maryland residents.

Pentagon officials say they will return to Capitol Hill this year to seek legislation exempting the military from key environmental laws. The military will renew arguments that laws protecting the air, endangered species and public health are hurting its ability to train troops for combat. Last year, a skeptical Congress rejected all but one of the nine proposed exemptions. But with Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress and the White House, the Pentagon is expected to have an easier time making its case.

James J. Wilson hardly looks like a felon.But the white-haired, 63-year-old real estate developer, chairman of Interstate General Co., has a date to report to federal prison in Cumberland in August. He and the companies he controls were convicted of illegally filling about 70 acres of wetlands in Charles County, where they are developing a Columbia-style planned community near Waldorf.Wilson, sentenced last week to 21 months in prison by a federal judge in Greenbelt, joins a growing number of people and businesses that have gotten a criminal record for violating environmental laws.

WASHINGTON -- Federal employees who "blow the whistle" on environmental wrongdoers can get better protection and more financial awards than whistle-blowers who have witnessed other types of violations.Few people know about the alternative legal system for environmental whistle-blowers, said Steve Kohn, an attorney with the National Whistleblower Center in Washington. "But when they're used -- and I've reviewed every case that's ever been issued under these laws -- they can be effective."While most federal whistle-blowing cases are conducted under civil service laws, a special procedure is outlined in six environmental laws, including statutes involving clean air, clean water and Superfund sites.

Key members of Maryland's congressional delegation expressed skepticism and outright opposition yesterday to the Pentagon's efforts to exempt military training from a raft of environmental laws. Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Paul S. Sarbanes, both Democrats, said a recent series of articles in The Sun underscored the urgency of fully funding cleanup programs and of holding the military to the same environmental standards as industrial polluters. "Parents shouldn't have to worry about chemicals leaking into their drinking water or what their kids might find while playing in the back yard," Mikulski said.

The Carroll County commissioners approved three environmental measures yesterday, including the creation of an Environmental Advisory Council and the new position of flood-plain management specialist. They also voted to have Jim Slater, the county's deputy director of environment and resource protection programs, consider requests for variances from environmental laws. Planning Director Steven C. Horn said the variances might be needed when strict adherence to state or local technical requirements would run counter to the intent of environmental laws.

We must remain stewards of the bay While reading about the fight over a 200-foot pier to be built off Dobbins Island (The Sun, Aug. 5) I learned that I had missed something on the crucial environment vs. development front. Sometime back, I learned of Daryl C. Wagner's beautiful home on Little Island on the Magothy River. I didn't read about it in Better Homes & Gardens or some other publication about beautiful homes. Rather I heard about it when WBAL-TV did a story about how Mr. Wagner, without applying for critical zoning variances, tore down a small cottage and constructed this home.

Would putting more polluters behind bars help restore the Chesapeake Bay? The Center for Progressive Reform believes it would. In a new report, the  a pro-regulatory think tank argues that both state and federal authorities prosecute water polluters too rarely in Maryland and that the state penalties for conviction aren't stiff enough to deter violators. Criminal prosecutions are an effective way to improve enforcement of environmental laws, especially when government regulators lack the funds to adequately inspect all potential polluters, says Rena Steinzor, the center's president and a professor at the University of Maryland's law school.

The message arrived last month with something like the urgency of a gold strike: Native brook trout, lots of them, discovered in the twin ditch creeks of an old farm in Hereford, in northern Baltimore County. Environmental scientists get pretty excited about this sort of thing. They found brown trout, too, and other smaller fish that a kid splashing around in summer might call minnows: sculpins, black-nosed dace and rosy-sided dace. Signs of life, to be sure, but more than that — signs of a delicate species' survival in a stream degraded for decades by the practices of men trying to earn a living off the land.

Maryland state Sen. Richard Colburn is fed up with the University of Maryland Environmental Law Clinic's lawsuit against a local chicken farm. But rather than try to shut the clinic down, Mr. Colburn introduced legislation to transfer $500,000 in funding from the University of Maryland to the University of Baltimore for the purpose of establishing an agricultural law clinic "dedicated to assisting farmers in the state with estates and trusts issues,...

Nobody asked me, but I'm betting - and hoping - that 85-year-old Roscoe Bartlett, Buckeystown's most durable Republican, will seek re-election in the reconfigured 6th Congressional District. There's been a lot of buzz about this lately, with political gossips saying Mr. Bartlett is doomed, and with numerous Republicans and Democrats lining up to run in the 2012 primaries. A political blogger reported that Mr. Bartlett's chief of staff, Bud Otis, has been exploring a run. Mr. Bartlett apparently hasn't been raising much money for a re-election bid, either.

Thelma Boyd and her Cheverly-area neighbors were at their wits' end when they connected with the University of Maryland's environmental law clinic. She and other residents of distressed, predominantly black neighborhoods on the outskirts of Washington had tried in vain to get local officials to keep a concrete plant from being built in their midst. Fearing a potential health threat, they felt their only recourse was to go to court but couldn't find a lawyer to take their case. "That's not the kind of case people will take," said Boyd, 87, who's lived there 56 years.

The Constitution says the legislative branch of government makes the laws and the executive branch implements and administers them. While the tea party wing of the Republican party was holding the country hostage and taking us on a suicidal dive, no one noticed they were also turning our Constitutional principle of separation of powers on its head by using an appropriations bill to subvert legislative intent and roll back environmental protections....

WASHINGTON -- The environmental movement's most concerted campaign in a generation is about to get under way as environmental groups around the country work to make the 25th anniversary of Earth Day spark a rebellion against a broad rollback of environmental legislation.Trying to influence lawmakers of both parties as they meet with constituents during the congressional recess, the groups are reviving all the usual organizing tools of a movement that came of age in 1970.They are also using new lobbying tactics that evolved after the first Earth Day, when millions of people took to the streets and helped persuade Congress to pass dozens of environmental laws in the ensuing decades.

CLARIFICATIONAn article in yesterday's editions of The Sun noted that Jane F. Barrett, a former assistant U.S. attorney, had a small figure of a barracuda in her office. The figure was not given to her by a federal judge but by an FBI agent.The "Barracuda" has bitten her last criminal. After 21 years of preying on polluters, poachers, con artists and wetlands despoilers, Jane F. Barrett leaves the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore today to swim on the other side.Looking for a new challenge -- and extra income to finance her son's looming college education -- the veteran federal prosecutor is joining a Washington law firm.

Drew Koslow steers his skiff under the Route 2 bridge near Annapolis and heads up the choppy South River, past the Spanish villas and faux-Victorian mansions that have replaced the cottages that once sat along its banks. Fifteen minutes into the trip, he has already noted a half-dozen violations of the state's pioneering Critical Area Law - or at least of the legislation's intent. On one lot, a property owner knocked down a small house and bulldozed a meadow of native grasses to put up two larger homes closer to the water.

We must remain stewards of the bay While reading about the fight over a 200-foot pier to be built off Dobbins Island (The Sun, Aug. 5) I learned that I had missed something on the crucial environment vs. development front. Sometime back, I learned of Daryl C. Wagner's beautiful home on Little Island on the Magothy River. I didn't read about it in Better Homes & Gardens or some other publication about beautiful homes. Rather I heard about it when WBAL-TV did a story about how Mr. Wagner, without applying for critical zoning variances, tore down a small cottage and constructed this home.