Guess whose standing in the way of Smart Growth now. Corporate meanies? Evil suburbanites? Greedy developers? Not exactly:
In a looming clash between Smart Growth and environmental protection, Cecil County officials say that a state plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay could steer development away from the county's designated growth area and onto farmland, where it would worsen sprawl and pollute the estuary even more.
"It will devastate us," said Nelson K. Bolender, president of the county commissioners. "It's bad. It's very bad."
The state plan, unveiled this year, would cap sewage treatment plant discharges in a bid to reduce nutrients fouling the bay. State officials say they need to curb pollutants from sewage plants, farms and lawns to reach the water-quality goals that Maryland and other bay states agreed to in 2000.
... Development is unlikely to be stopped by lack of sewage treatment capacity and will spread into rural areas intended to be used for farming, officials say.
"The result will be sprawl - houses built on conventional septic systems that will produce more nutrients [in] the bay, not less," Carter said.
Summers acknowledged that home septic systems release more nutrients per capita than sewage plants. But he said that allowing Cecil to release more nutrients from its North East River plant would undermine a statewide effort to reduce nutrients from every sewage facility that discharges into the bay or its tributaries.
The basic concept at work is that if they can't measure something then they can't get blamed for it. Stuff going through a central plant gets measured and the other stuff doesnt so they can increase the polution level while at the same time looking like they are trying to reduce it.
Posted by: John Morris | December 11, 2006 at 02:11 PM