‘Smart Growth’ Goals Frustrated By Local Authorities

In a pasture, along a tree-lined road, a small herd of hefty black-and-white striped “Oreo cows” — more formally known as Belted Galloways — graze near the entrance to a housing development widely regarded as one of the few examples of “smart growth” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The Village of Cooke’s Hope is a neighborhood of upscale, single-family homes set on small, manicured lots in the town of Easton. Planners praise it for combining land preservation with housing innovation.

“Everybody loves Cooke’s Hope,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “You are driving down the road and you see a bunch of designer cows. That’s because there is a conservation easement on the property out in front. Then you drive in and there is a little village. The houses… have a color palette, vernacular architecture, and they are not all the same builder houses.”

McMahon said that while growth and development are inevitable, it is important to control where they go and what they look like.

“Beyond a handful of projects, there is not a whole lot that you can go and look at on the Eastern Shore that is not your typical crapola suburban development,” he said.

image‘Oreo Cows’ graze near the entrance of Cooke’s Hope, a smart-growth neighborhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Dick Cooper/CPI)It’s an especially sobering assessment in light of recent history here. After more than a decade of well-intentioned efforts to serve as a national model of carefully managed development, Maryland finds its so-called Smart Growth programs frustrated by local governments whose parochial interests often trump the broader visions of regional and statewide planning efforts.

Partly as a result, the pastoral Eastern Shore is at risk of losing tens of thousands of acres of farms and forests over the next two decades if current growth patterns are not changed, according to a state Department of Planning report issued last year.

Story continued at the Center for Public Integrity

Informational Meeting to Discuss Southern Kent Island Sewer Options

The public is invited to hear a presentation and offer suggestions on the study
currently being conducted on the feasibility of providing public sewer and water service to southern Kent Island. Residents are encouraged to offer their feedback and comments during this initial study phase of the project.

The meeting is on Wednesday, June 17 beginning at 7 p.m. in the Kent Island High School auditorium. An open house from 6 to 7 p.m. will give residents an opportunity to look over presentation materials, ask questions and provide comments.

The study area includes existing communities designated as “public health service areas” in the County’s Comprehensive Water & Sewerage Plan. The study will consider the impacts of various build out scenarios of the remaining vacant lots including environmental, stormwater management, drainage, traffic, water supply, schools, public safety, financial and legal considerations.

Staff from the consulting firm of Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson will be leading the presentation. The communities included in the study are Tower Gardens, Kent Island Estates, Romancoke, Queen Anne Colony, Kentmorr, Sunny Isle of Kent, Chesapeake Estates, Normans and Matapeake Estates.

Additional information on the project, including links to the study scope of work and regional maps, may be found under “quick links” on Queen Anne’s County’s website at www.qac.org.

Tipping Points For The Bay

By Tom Horton

06/02/2009

In the upper Chesapeake Bay, cutting pollution has lagged well behind goals scientists say are needed to restore the estuary.

Yet across thousands of acres there, all-important underwater grass habitats have exploded in recent years to levels not seen in half a century.

Downstream, throughout much of the bay's mainstem, excessive pollution levels have held fairly steady during recent decades.

Yet deepwater "deadzones," massive volumes of water with too little oxygen for aquatic life, have steadily worsened and expanded there.

And another wrinkle. Just in the last couple years there are tantalizing hints the bay mainstem might be getting better--again with scant change in pollution levels.

Upstream and down are examples of "thresholds", or tipping points that perplex and intrigue scientists, who say there's still a lot we don't understand about managing big, complex natural systems back to health.

It's critical to know why we're doing better than expected some places, and worse in others, says Michael Kemp, a University of Maryland researcher who recently co-edited "Thresholds in the Recovery of Eutrophic (polluted) Coastal Ecosystems."

Kemp says such knowledge can help us target limited cleanup resources, and also help maintain support for extended and costly restoration efforts that often won't follow a neat script of pollution-down, water quality-up.

Indeed, last month Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, media aboard, was out on a section of the upper bay that scored an all-too-rare grade of B-minus in an annual survey of Chesapeake water quality (the bay overall got a C-minus, with some tributaries getting D's and F's).

O'Malley's point: "We're quick to say humans are the cause where there's degradation. . . but there are places where we're winning, so we're doing some things right too."

But what things? That may be the real point. Some are known: in the upper bay a big pollution cut from Harford county's Sod Run sewage treatment plant, many intact buffers of wetlands and forests that filter polluted runoff, and a lack of deep channels where dead zones occur helped the water quality grade.

Kemp noted in his report that for many reasons both chemical and biological, it's usually in the freshwater, shallow parts of systems like the Chesapeake where comebacks first happen.

"But even after we list all the factors we know, we still don't understand why we achieved a B-minus," said Bill Dennison, the University of Maryland scientist who oversees the baywide water quality survey.

Downstream, something flipped a switch the other way between 1980 and 1985, Kemp says. At that point, even though pollution loads hadn't increased, for every pound of pollution coming in, the bay began losing twice as much oxygen as before.

This "regime change" as Kemps puts it was not well understood until Environmental Protection Agency scientist Jim Hagy pulled together all the evidence in a 2004 report. The implications were sobering: "you almost couldn't get back (to healthy water quality)," Kemp says.

Now, based on some "very preliminary monitoring," there's reason to suspect the bay's mainstem may have crossed a threshold where each pound of pollution is causing substantially less dead zone impact, Kemp says.

Just as with the upper bay rebound, we need to know what is triggering these thresholds downstream, he says.

For example, if the bay's entering a state now where it is dealing better with pollution, it would be time to redouble efforts to cut the incoming nitrogen and phosphorus that causes dead zones and the loss of submerged grasses..

As in the upper bay comeback, there are some likely contributors to the downstream's deterioration: continued loss of oysters that filtered pollution; losses of worms that burrow in the bay's bottom, oxygenating it; additional chemical releases of pollution lodged in bottom sediments, triggered by lower oxygen in the deeps.

But again, what's known still doesn't add up to an answer.

Kemp says he's got "a gut feeling" there might be something not on the list of usual suspects that caused the bay's mainstem to reach a tipping point back in the 80's, and to perhaps be tipping back now to a better state.

He's considering influences outside the bay, such as oscillations in North Atlantic Ocean currents. These could influence how water circulates within the Chesapeake, which can affect the bay's ability to deal with pollution. He says it's still speculation at this point.

The bottom line, bay scientists say, remains that only large scale reductions of both nitrogen and phosphorus will restore the Chesapeake.

But the path there will almost certainly not follow a smooth or predictable slope--rather more like bounding up a staircase, or slipping off a ledge, or some of both.

Ironically, just as scientists are calling for additional monitoring of bay processes to try and understand these tipping points, the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program is considering significant cuts in those monitoring programs.

Tom Horton covered the bay for 33 years for The Sun in Baltimore, and is author of six books about the Chesapeake. He is currently a freelance writer. Distributed by Bay Journal News Service.

Distributed by Bay Journal News Service

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