Matt Johnston, executive director of the Arundel Rivers Federation, and Cynthia Williams, president of the Provinces Civic Association, stand by the outfall for the 2-acre stormwater pond known as Lake Marion in Anne Arundel County. (Photo by Dave Harp/Chesapeake Bay Journal)
By Timothy B. Wheeler
The Chesapeake Bay Journal
After decades of frustrating delay, silt-clogged Lake Marion in Severn is finally getting a badly needed makeover.
The 2-acre stormwater detention pond, filled with 50 years’ worth of mud from surrounding homes and streets, has been dredged out so it can capture runoff again.
“For 20 years, we’d been trying to get funding for this project,” said Cynthia Williams, president of the Provinces Civic Association. With the help of the nonprofit Arundel Rivers Federation, the community finally rounded up enough support from state and local agencies and others to cover the nearly $4 million cost.
When work is finished later this year, the new pond and its rock-lined “step pools” are expected to prevent about 11 dump truck loads of water-fouling sediment from being flushed downstream every year into the Severn River.
But environmental advocates fear it could be one of the last sizable runoff control projects done in Maryland for the next several years because state funding that helped make it possible is threatened.
DNR wants to focus restoration efforts on five watersheds, but funding is in doubt
While the Trump administration has paused or canceled billions in environmental funding nationwide, Maryland faces a fiscal crisis of its own. Lawmakers in Annapolis are struggling to figure out how to fill a staggering $3 billion budget gap, and legislative analysts have recommended they drain funds reserved for preserving land, restoring wildlife habitat and reducing stormwater pollution.
Advocates warn that could further cripple water quality, climate mitigation and environmental justice efforts in the state.
“We’re struggling … right now with these budget cuts in Washington,” said Matt Johnston, Arundel Rivers’ executive director. “Now is not the time for Annapolis to abandon its leadership role in Chesapeake Bay restoration.”
To balance the state’s budget, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore initially proposed a combination of spending cuts and increased taxes and fees. Environmental programs and the four state agencies that administer them faced a 25% reduction totaling $255 million.
Deep as those cuts seemed, environmental advocates for the most part accepted them. The spending reductions proposed by the Moore administration left something to work with, they said.
But Moore’s plan has drawn widespread pushback over his proposed tax changes and his other spending cuts. Lawmakers are looking for other ways to close the budget gap.
The General Assembly’s nonpartisan fiscal analysts responded by recommending a panoply of additional cuts, including taking another $180 million overall from environmental efforts — not just for one year, as Moore had proposed, but for the next four years.
Now environmental advocates are alarmed. They’re warning that efforts in Maryland to improve the Bay and to fight or adapt to climate change could stall out.
Especially hard hit would be the Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Trust Fund, which in fiscal 2024 distributed more than $60 million for projects like Lake Marion that aim to reduce polluted runoff from farms and communities. The fund, created in 2010, is underwritten by revenue from a tax on gasoline and car rentals.
Moore originally proposed taking $10.5 million from the trust fund to offset some of the cuts he would make in the budgets of state environmental agencies. The fiscal analysts in the Department of Legislative Services suggested increasing the diversion to $65 million annually for the next four years.
Also slashed would be Maryland’s Program Open Space, which uses money raised by a 0.5% tax on real estate transfers to acquire land for parks, playgrounds and natural areas. Since the program’s creation in 1969, more than 394,000 acres have been protected. A portion of the transfer tax revenue also goes toward preserving farmland.
The transfer tax brings in more than $200 million a year, a revenue stream that previous administrations and legislatures have dipped into whenever budgets were tight. Despite politicians’ pledges to put back what they took, advocates point out that more than $600 million diverted since 2012 has never been restored.
In his budget, Moore had suggested shifting $16 million from Program Open Space to offset cuts he proposed in general funding for the Maryland Park Service. Legislative analysts upped the ante, though, recommending a complete diversion for the next four years of the state’s share of the open space funds and a halving of a similar amount set aside for local governments to spend on parks and recreation facilities.
Advocates say such a loss of funding could kill land preservation deals that have taken years to negotiate. Ann Jones, an officer with a Baltimore County land trust, said a young farmer she’s trying to help purchase his first farm could not do so without state assistance.
“It would basically shut these programs down,” said Allison Colden, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
The cuts would have economic as well as environmental consequences, Colden said, affecting Maryland’s seafood and tourist industries, among others, which depend on clean water and healthy fisheries, while also costing jobs in businesses that specialize in environmental restoration.
“These projects employ dozens if not hundreds of workers,” said Nick Dilks, a managing partner with Ecosystem Investment Partners, a Baltimore-based firm that has worked on trust-funded stream restorations in Cecil County. “At any given time, we probably had at least 10 to 15 people out there working,” he added, doing everything from operating backhoes to planting trees and spraying weeds.
“This is part of the Chesapeake economy,” said Arundel Rivers’ Johnston. “If we lose a quarter-billion dollars [through the proposed Bay trust fund cut], it would be years before we could come up with enough money to do another Lake Marion project.”
Advocates were cheered recently when legislative analysts retracted one of their recommendations to siphon $25 million from the state’s waterways improvement fund. But then Moore declared he would trim proposed spending on climate-related efforts by $80 million — which would still be an increase, but a much smaller one.
The state’s economic forecaster warned that federal layoffs are putting thousands of Marylanders out of work, widening the state’s budget gap.
Lawmakers have until the General Assembly’s close at midnight on April 7 to finalize the budget.
“It’s not over til it’s over,” said the Bay Foundation’s Colden.