Published on: Thursday, March 11, 2010

By Rabiah Alicia Burks

Maryland’s new 2007 Stormwater Management Act is expected to help reduce storm water runoff into the Chesapeake Bay.

“The whole reason that we are doing this is because we have big water quality issues in Maryland with the Chesapeake Bay,” said Dawn Stoltzfus, director of communication for the Maryland Department for the Environment. The last law that was created surrounding stormwater regulations was a decade ago.

“Urban and suburban runoff is about 20 percent of the nitrogen load in Maryland,” said Stoltzfus. “Obviously we need to get a handle on this large pollution source.”

According to Stoltzfus, the Maryland Department of the Environment is trying to encourage redevelopment. Under the new guidelines, redeveloped projects have to meet only 50 percent of the new regulations while new projects are required to meet the guidelines 100 percent.

“We’re trying to control the pollution that we’re all creating by living on the watershed in the first place,” said Stoltzfus.

The act was signed into law in May 2007 and the MDE was given the task of drafting regulations to put the law into effect. For two years, the department accepted public comment seeking input from stakeholders on the new rules.

So far, counties have submitted their respective ordinances and now the MDE is reviewing them. Once approved, the new ordinances will go in effect in May.

“Right now, what we are seeing is that because local ordinances are nearing final completion, there is some confusion about a couple of key issues,” said Stoltzfus. “One of them being what projects can follow the old regulations.”

However, not everyone is satisfied with the law.

“We are for cleaning up the bay—we’ve always been for cleaning up the bay—but if these regulations aren’t going to work, then that means the counties and other jurisdictions throughout the state may not get the kind of development they need, which is going to be important to the tax base of the county,” said F. Hamer Campbell Jr., government affairs director of the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association.

“We made suggestions at the end of last year since the record closed in January 2009 that, in fact, some grandfathering regulations be put in and they are not,” said Campbell.

Another concern is that some phases of larger projects that take many years to build, which started under the development of the older law, will not be approved under the new laws, according to Campbell. 

“If you have a phased project, and your first phase meets the requirements of the current law, and then you have to deal with storm water management with the other phases. Once you get to the other phases, then you are not going to be able to do that. You are going to have to meet the new requirements, and that is a concern of ours that can make a project not economically feasible,” said Campbell.

Due to the country’s economic situation over the past two years, Campbell says that most projects are not going forward.