City, county to set shared watershed goals

The Baltimore Sun

Baltimore and Baltimore County officials pledged yesterday to take a joint approach to improve the health of shared waterways, charging new committees to develop concrete goals for improvement by Oct. 1.

The city-county partnership is a somewhat unusual approach to waterway management, officials said, as regional governments do not typically meet to create mutual goals for shared watersheds.

"I don't think there are a lot of formal bodies that have been set up among local governments," said Brad Heavner, the director of Environment Maryland, a citizen-based advocacy group.

The two regions share several major watersheds, which comprise hundreds of square miles in the city and county, including Gwynns Falls and Jones Falls, Herring Run, the Patapsco River and Baltimore Harbor. All have been affected by rapid development, which creates the potential for major public health risks - particularly from rainwater contaminated by pesticides, emissions and other toxic substances.

It is not the first time the city and county have come together to talk about the health of their shared water.

The two entities first agreed to work together five years ago. Since then, they have created a Watershed Advisory Group, coordinated stream water quality assessment, jointly funded a nine-month study of Gwynns Falls and held an annual watershed conference.

"It's a coordinated approach to get to federal and state requirements," said David Carroll, director of Baltimore County's Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management. "I think the mayor and the county executive have established this to move faster."

Yesterday's pact, signed by Mayor Sheila Dixon and County Executive James T. Smith, is new because it forms five committees that must set goals for the health of the waterways by Oct. 1. Next, they will create formal plans for attacking each of five issues - storm water management, community greening, development, public health and trash - by October 2008.

The team effort is significant because local governments have sometimes been reluctant to collaborate on environmental policy, said Heavner. Few local officials want to share authority over their own waterways, and many local governments are competing with each other to create more development-friendly environmental policies that bring in booming businesses.

"Every county wants commercial development," Heavner said. "At this point a developer that wants to build McMansions just has to go from county to county to find a place to do it. ... If we all get together and say, 'No we want Smart Growth,' the developers will change their tune."

The agreement comes at a critical time for local waterways.

In April, the Chesapeake Bay Program, a partnership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and states in the bay watershed, released a report on the dismal state of the bay and surrounding waterways: degraded water quality, a declining blue crab population, pollution-ridden rivers and enormous losses in bay grasses. In its own report, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science gave the bay a D+ in terms of health.

"I think it's absolutely critical for the city and the county to get together to do this," said Eliza Steinmeier, director of Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that seeks to protect the Baltimore Harbor and Patapsco River. "I don't think this is just another 'Let's form a committee and pat each other on the back.'"

julie.turkewitz@baltsun.com

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