The Maryland General Assembly’s annual legislative session opens today in Annapolis. The most important environmental bill being proposed would provide money to help solve a problem that has been choking the life out of the Chesapeake Bay.
Big poultry companies, like Maryland’s Perdue, own the nearly 300 million chickens raised every year on the Eastern Shore, but not the more than billion pounds of manure they produce.
The companies dump the responsibility and cost of managing this waste on taxpayers and family farmers. And that financial burden is expected to grow because of new manure application limits issued by the Hogan Administration last year to reduce runoff pollution into the bay.
Proposed legislation called the Poultry Litter Management Act would hold the poultry companies – not taxpayers or farmers – responsible for the cost of trucking excess waste to fields that are not already overloaded with manure, or to alternative energy or recycling facilities. The bill is sponsored by Senators Joan Carter Conway of Baltimore and Rich Madaleno of Montgomery County, as well as state Delegate Clarence Lam, M.D., of Howard and Baltimore counties.
“This really helps family farmers by taking the burden off of them and shifting it to the big companies that have a lot more money available to them,” said Betsy Nicholas, Executive Director of Waterkeepers Chesapeake.
In the area of climate change, a bill proposed this year would continue Maryland’s initiatives to drive down carbon dioxide pollution by requiring the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by about 30 percent by 2030. Companion legislation would direct $40 million to community colleges to educate state residents – especially women and minorities – in climate-friendly jobs like installing solar panels.
“The $40 million actually comes not from taxpayers, not from ratepayers, but from Dominion Resources – a company in Virginia,” said Mike Tidwell, founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “Dominion had to pay $40 million to the state as a condition for the pollution it was creating by exporting fracked gas out of southern Maryland to Asia at a facility called Cove Point.”
Baltimore Delegate Brooke Lierman is a sponsor of legislation that would attempt to control litter by banning the use of plastic grocery bags statewide. Her bill would also add a ten cent charge for paper bags as a way to encourage people to bring their own cloth reusable bags.
Julie Lawson, executive director of Trash Free Maryland, said that Washington D.C. imposed a five cent charge on plastic and paper bags in 2010 and saw cleaner streets and waterways as a result.
“In DC, 80 percent of people carry re-usable bags with them,” Lawson said. “They are so reminded by the charge that they don’t need the plastic bag -- and that they already have reusable bags they can use for free -- that they bring their reusable bags. And then, at the end of the chain, we are finding 72 percent fewer plastic bags in stream cleanups around the area.”
Pesticides are also being targeted with restrictions. In the wake of a 60 percent decline of bee hives in Maryland last year alone, proposed legislation would ban the sale of insecticides called neonicotinoids to gardeners and homeowners (although not farmers).
Bonnie Raindrop, a Baltimore beekeeper, said an increasing number of studies suggest that “neonics” may be playing a role in bee die-offs across the country.
“An important correlation to what we’re seeing with the loss of 60 percent of our bees would be to think if a dairy farmer lost 60 percent of their cows,” Raindrop said. “It’s a devastating number.”
It tough to predict how much of this legislation will actually pass, with most of it facing opposition. But hope springs eternal with the new year and a new General Assembly session. And the odds are reasonable that at least one or two of these bills will be law by springtime and make Maryland a greener place.
(Photo from Baltimore Sun)
