Bay restoration forums this week
Marylanders, here's your chance this week to weigh in on the federal government's newly released draft strategy for restoring the Chesapeake Bay.
Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies will be on hand at a pair of public forums in Baltimore and Salisbury to answer questions or take comments.
The first Maryland forum will be Wednesday (Dec. 2) at the National Aquarium, 501 E. Pratt Street in downtown Baltimore. The second will be Thursday (Dec. 3) at the Wicomico County Civic Center, 500 Glen Ave., in Salisbury. Each session will run from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
In case you missed it, earlier this month, carrying out an executive order from President Obama, federal officials released a plan for asserting federal leadership in jump-starting the lagging bay cleanup effort. Among other things, the draft strategy proposes expanding and stiffening federal regulations to crack down on polluted runoff from farming and from new and existing development, but only if states fail to come up with equally effective measures for controlling such pollution.
The prospect of more federal rules and tighter government oversight has upset farmers and developers, who contend they're being unfairly singled out and say they fear being regulated out of business. Environmentalists, meanwhile, have voiced disappointment with federal officials' apparent willingness to wait for states to act, after more than 25 years of disappointing results from a largely cooperative state-federal cleanup "partnership."
Federal officials say they'll be guided by public feedback as they revise their bay restoration plan and make it final in May 2010. Marylanders who work in Washington or live in its suburbs may find the forum there on Tuesday, Dec. 2, more convenient; it's to be held at the Penn Quarter Conference Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Other forums are planned later this month in West Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Those who can't attend a forum can still submit comments online through Jan. 8. To learn more about the plan, and to make comments online, go here.
And if you're so inclined, you can also submit video questions; record your inquiry in a clip of 30 seconds or less and upload it to YouTube with a tag of "chesapeakebayeo." Officials plan to air a selection of video questions at the forums and in an online Q&A with federal officials in January.
(Baltimore Sun file photo by Kenneth K. Lam)
Comments
Can you please verify the Dec 2 meeting at the National Aquarium? According to the EPA's TMDL website, the Baltimore briefing is to be held on Dec 8 at the MDE office @ 1800 Washington Blvd, Suite 530.
http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/tmdl/ChesapeakeBay/CalendarOfEvents_2009.html?tab2=5
TW: Two separate, though related, forums, Dan. There is indeed a public question and comment session Wednesday (Dec. 2) at the National Aquarium. It's focused on the federal government's overall strategy for restoring the bay, which goes beyond the bay's water quality to deal with such things as conserving land and managing fisheries.
There's a separate set of meetings on the strict pollution "diet" that the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing for all the states and communities that drain into the bay. That diet, known bureaucratically as a "total maximum daily load", is an integrall part of the federal bay restoration strategy. There is indeed a meeting to discuss it Dec. 8 at the Maryland Department of the Environment in Baltimore. There's another one Dec. 11 at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills on the Eastern Shore. Both meetings are in the afternoon, which means you have to take off from work - though there'll also be a "webinar" presented online for those who can't attend in person, explaining what pollution limits are proposed and why. The link you provided lists times and locations of all those meetings. To learn more about the TMDL, go to http://www.epa.gov/chesapeakebaytmdl/
Hope that clears up the muddy meeting situation.
Posted by: Dan Spack | November 30, 2009 10:09 PM