In his January 18th piece, "New Md. Rules on Stormwater Assailed," Tim Wheeler describes the content of a Smart Growth Task Force meeting at the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) where members of the development community came out to oppose new regulations aimed at tightening pollution control standards on re-development sites.

Having been at the meeting, I wasn't surprised so much by the overwhelming sentiment from the development community; they don't want to have to pay the cost of making their projects pollute less. What did surprise me was the willful and repeated misrepresentation of the new guidelines being set forth by MDE. In almost every case study presented, developers claimed the new regulations would cut into the density of their development. What they failed to acknowledge is that the new regulations have a flexibility that allows for off-site mitigation or for the developer to pay a "fee-in-lieu" if stormwater management can't reasonably be handled on the site. Density can still be achieved, smart growth can be preserved, but dollars will be passed to the local jurisdictions to assist with targeted restoration of degraded creeks and streams.

Most astonishing of all, however, were the local government staffers who called for a weakening of the new regulations. If you happen to live in Baltimore City or Baltimore or Howard counties, I would ask that you put in a call into your planning department to ask why high-level bureaucrats were testifying before MDE to weaken pollution regulations on developers, forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab for the environmental consequences of their projects.

We have a multi-billion dollar backlog of restoration work that needs to be accomplished in order to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and re-development represents an important opportunity in that regard. We can't get clean rivers and a clean bay without everyone picking up their fair share of the cost. Gutting these regulations would represent a huge step in the wrong direction.

Erik Michelsen, Edgewater

The writer is executive director of the South River Federation.

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