Attorney General Doug Gansler wants boaters to stop using the Chesapeake Bay as their toilet.
Speaking at a bay symposium Thursday at the University of Baltimore law school, Gansler said he plans to ask the General Assembly to declare the entire bay (or at least the Maryland portion) a no-discharge zone for boaters.
It's already illegal to dump raw sewage anywhere, and according to the Department of Natural Resources more than 300 marinas statewide have facilities where boaters can pump out their waste holding tanks and portable toilets.
"Most boaters do bring their tanks into the marina, and (the sewage) goes to the wastewater treatment plants," Gansler said. "But some don't." Some boaters also have "fancy heads," as he called them, which disinfect the waste but don't remove the nitrogen. Boaters with certain approved "marine sanitation devices," as they're called, are allowed to discharge their treated wastes.
The state now has two official no-discharge zones in areas heavily used by boaters - Herring Bay in Anne Arundel County, and the northern coastal bays in Worcester County. Boaters in those areas are forbidden to dump raw or even treated sewage from their heads. Gansler said he would work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state lawmakers to expand the no-discharge designation to cover the entire bay.
Gansler, who has introduced an environmental bill in every General Assembly session since being elected, acknowledged that this measure wasn't as far-reaching as his previous legislative efforts. In prior years, he's pushed to ban phosphates in dishwasher detergents, to have chicken manure declared a renewable energy fuel and to give environmental and community groups legal standing to sue polluters. The first two passed, while last year's standing bill was watered down to give groups the right to challenge environmental permits, but not to sue to enforce the laws.
"We're not going to fix the bay so its pristine after this," Gansler said, noting that boat waste discharges account for a tiny fraction (about 1 percent, he said) of the nitrogen contributing to the bay's dead zones. "But it's something that's very controllable,'' the AG added.
Gansler said that boaters he's spoken with favor his idea, and he suggested that it would have broad public support among non-boaters as well. What do you think? Is the holding tank smell and pumpout hassle worth it for such a small source of the bay's pollution? Or is it the least boaters can do to help the bay that they depend on for recreation?