Water Pollution

Maryland's swimming beaches have better water quality than those in most coastal states, but still lag neighboring Delaware and Virginia, according to the latest review by an environmental group. In its annual nationwide survey of beach water quality, the Natural Resources Defense Council says that Maryland's public wading and swimming areas ranked 11th among 30 coastal states, including those bordering the Great Lakes.  Delaware ranked first overall, while Virginia ranked sixth, with fewer high-bacteria readings on their beaches.  But a stretch of beach in Ocean City running from 126th Street north to 145th Street earned the NRDC's five-star rating as one of the 12 cleanest in the nation, for not showing any bacteria problems since 2007 and having strong standards for frequent testing and prompt notification of the public if a problem is found.  Delaware's Dewey Beach also earned a five-star rating.

A new permit proposed by the state for curbing runoff in Baltimore city is coming under fire from a pair of environmental groups, which contend it fails to require big enough reductions in the pollution fouling the harbor. The Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper and Earthjustice say the storm-water permit proposed for the city last week by the Maryland Department of the Environment is vague and weak. The groups are calling on the state to include specific deadlines and enforceable requirements in the permit, arguing that without those it's little more than "guidance" for the city.

Maryland officials are drawing up plans to require potentially costly water pollution "offsets" for new development to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay. The new policy, which officials plan to begin airing next month, would force developers to pay for pollution reductions elsewhere to offset any increases in bay-fouling nitrogen that would result from their projects, said Robert M. Summers , state environment secretary.  He outlined the...

Steep projected costs for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay could be trimmed by billions of dollars, a new study suggests, by allowing polluters to buy "credits" for less-expensive reductions made by others. The study, presented Thursday to the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory panel of legislators from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, estimates that nutrient pollution trading could trim projected costs for upgrading sewage treatment plants and controlling urban and suburban storm water pollution by $1 billion or more a year baywide.

Nearly all of the toxic pollutants in Maryland's waterways come from the watershed that enters the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, according to a report released Thursday by an environmental watchdog group. The Gunpowder-Patapsco Watershed, which stretches above the Maryland-Pennsylvania border and as far west as Mount Airy, had more than 1.3 million pounds of toxins dumped into it during 2010, the nonprofit group Environment Maryland concluded. That's 98 percent of the chemicals released into the state's waterways that year, the report said.

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.

I was shocked and very disappointed to see Gov. Martin O'Malley's letter regarding the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland ("O'Malley butts in," Nov. 21). Mr. O'Malley has been a champion of clean energy and global warming solutions, and he has promoted some sound policies to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, like reducing pollution from septic systems. But when it comes to this lawsuit, I believe the governor is clearly in the wrong. This case is about defending our clean water laws and protecting the Chesapeake Bay. Even more fundamentally, it's about whether poultry companies should be held responsible for water pollution caused by their chickens' manure.

Whatever the pressures of his city law practice, Robert Lazzaro could count on finding refuge at the end of the day at his home in Jacksonville, where the back deck offered quiet, a hot tub and a woodland view. That changed five years ago after an Exxon station less than a mile away leaked about 25,000 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline into the groundwater, contaminating dozens of wells and casting a shadow of fear over the small community in northern Baltimore County. "It's a constant worry, it's a constant stressor," said Lazzaro.

Entering the fourth decade of a massive effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay's health, how do we keep "hiding" tens of millions of pounds of a well-documented water pollutant? We do it with the complicity of a national network of influential agricultural scientists who care less about water quality than about helping farmers avoid the gigantic disposal problem they face with excess manure. The dilemma for the watershed's poultry and livestock farmers is stark: To get enough nitrogen on fields to grow a crop, they must spread manure in amounts that build up phosphorus in the soil so excessively that it runs off and pollutes waterways, even if the farmer employs otherwise sound conservation practices.

Maryland is failing to ride herd on water pollution in the state because of serious funding shortfalls and its own flawed enforcement practices, according to a Washington-based think tank. The Center for Progressive Reform contends in a new report that while Maryland has some of the nation's toughest environmental laws, its enforcement of water pollution regulations is lagging. "They could do better," Robert L. Glicks- man, the report's co-author and environmental law professor at George Washington University, said of state environmental officials.