Protecting the Chesapeake Bay shoreline
Taking steps to curb harmful development
One of Environment Maryland’s top priorities this legislative session is to improve protections of the Chesapeake Bay shoreline.
We
worked hard this winter to develop policy proposals and to build a
coalition of organizations throughout the state to advocate strong
reforms.
One of the best things we can do to reduce pollution
going into rivers and the Chesapeake Bay is to maintain vegetation
along the shoreline. Plants and marshland can soak up pollution before
it hits waterways. But developers have been turning these vital wetland
and forest buffers into vacation homes and resorts, changing natural
filters that cleaned the bay into hot spots of polluted runoff.
Strengthening our current law
Maryland
has a law limiting development along the shoreline—the Critical Area
Act—but the law has many loopholes and is not well enforced. The law is
supposed to protect sensitive lands within 1,000 feet of the shoreline
and parts of the bay’s tributaries. To have this impact, the state
needs to play a stronger role in enforcing and interpreting the law,
and have more authority to stop harmful developments before they start.
Maryland and other states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed face
a 2010 deadline to meet pollution reduction goals before the U.S. EPA
begins enforcing tougher measures. Over the next few years, we need to
implement strong programs to reduce farmland runoff, retrofit cities
and suburbs with modern water control technologies, and upgrade sewage
treatment plants.
Due to the attention centered upon shoreline
development during the recent debates over the Blackwater resort in
Dorchester County and the Four Seasons hotel on Kent Island, the
Critical Area Act is the water quality policy that is most ripe for
change.
Environment Maryland met with staff of the Critical Area
Commission and other experts last fall to develop policies to improve
the law. We held strategy meetings for key partners and have reached
out to dozens of groups to get involved.
Shoreline at North Point State Park, an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay.
