|
|
Don't let alien invaders take over Bay's landscape
Native plants help to save time, money, Chesapeake watershed
Let native beauty outshine invaders in your landscape
MD offers coupon to urge more drivers to choose tougher emissions test
Gaily colored brochures, $2 coupons and more convenient hours are part of an initiative to get more Maryland drivers to accept a tougher vehicle emissions testing program.
Drivers who volunteer to take the dynamometer test – where cars are placed on a treadmill-like device and driven at high speeds – will get $2 off the $12 testing fee, state officials announced in August.
Secretary of Transportation David L. Winstead said the discount and other changes were to make the program more “customer friendly” after a recent survey showed that people supported tougher testing but wanted more information on the procedures.
He said the $2 coupons were a good incentive to get more drivers to choose the unpopular test, which will become mandatory in June 1997.
Thirteen percent of drivers are opting for the test already, up from 5 percent last year, said Jane T. Nishida, secretary of the environment.
“I hope it becomes the preferred choice for all Marylanders,” she said.
But Delegate Martha Klima, R-Baltimore County, said the new measures won’t persuade opponents of the dynamometer to allow technicians to drive their cars on the treadmills. She said she has 125,000 signatures from people opposed to the test.
Maryland’s tougher vehicle emissions testing program was to go into effect January 1995 but was delayed because of driver opposition. The delay also gave MARTA, the company that operates the testing stations, time to work out glitches in the testing program.
The tougher measures are intended to bring Maryland in compliance with the 1990 federal Clean Air Act. By testing and repairing approximately 2.4 million vehicles every other year, 21 tons of ozone-forming pollutants can be removed from the air each day, officials say.
Lawmaker urges Virginia to help fix sewage plants
One of Virginia’s top environmental lawmakers has warned that the state probably will fail to meet a key cleanup goal for Chesapeake Bay tributaries if it doesn’t spend more money fixing sewage plants.
Del. W. Tayloe Murphy Jr., D-Warsaw, said that without state aid to help local governments upgrade sewage plants, it’ll be nearly impossible to cut nitrogen levels by 40 percent, as prescribed under the Chesapeake Bay agreements.
In contrast, the state of Maryland is offering millions of dollars in assistance to cities and sanitation districts to help install sophisticated anti-nitrogen technology at 59 major sewage plants, he said.
He called it “disgraceful” that Virginia, with more Bay coastline than any otherstate, spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget on environmental protection.
But Becky Norton Dunlop, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources, said other, less expensive technologies are being studied for sewage plants. She said money is not always the answer. “Our goal has been not to focus on the funding question,” Dunlop said. “If you have a feeling that any solution will be financed automatically, you tend to come up with the most expensive solution.”
The technology mentioned most often at the conference was biological nitrogen removal. The expensive process, installed at a handful of sewage plants in Virginia, moves sewage through a series of tanks containing micro-organisms that consume nitrogen.
Bill Matuszeski, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay office, said nine of the top 10 nitrogen-producing plants that lack commitments to install the new technology are in Virginia. If all those plants were equipped with biological treatment, one-third of the nitrogen problems remaining in the Bay could be solved, he said.
Pilot emissions program to begin in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania will begin a series of pilot automobile testing programs this autumn.
The pilot will be a decentralized program, tied to vehicle safety inspections.
Manufacturers will loan the emissions inspection and testing equipment to volunteer garages in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the overall cost of the pilot should be minimal at best, said Louis Curl, director of the state Motor Vehicle Bureau.
Statewide, motor vehicles contribute about a third of the chemicals that lead to ground level ozone, said Chris Novak, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The pilot program is designed to demonstrate to the public the equipment and procedures that will be used and followed once the state begins the full program next year with nine counties. The remaining counties would start inspections in 1999.
According to a program outline DEP Secretary James Seif sent to the EPA, emissions inspections will take place once a year, and a vehicle would first have to pass that inspection before owners could get a safety inspection sticker.
Garages would charge an initial $8 fee for emissions inspection, but that fee could go higher or lower, depending upon market forces.
Environmental enforcement falls sharply in Maryland
It took complaints from residents to get the state to acknowledge a coal company last fall spilled 70,000 gallons of blackened slurry into the Potomac River.
It took threats from the EPA to prompt Maryland to fine the city of Baltimore $10,000 for allowing a wastewater treatment plant to discharge excessive nutrients that harm the Chesapeake Bay.
A review by the Baltimore Sun found that that enforcement of environmental laws in Maryland has declined, sharply in some categories, in the past two years, and federal regulators want to know why.
The number of environmental citations increased overall from fiscal 1994 to 1995, but most of that came in radiation safety.
Citations for water, wastewater and wetlands violations combined dropped by half from fiscal 1993 through 1995. The number of criminal prosecutions brought by the state has fallen by 29 percent since fiscal 1993.
In 1995, the Maryland Department of the Environment brought 22 criminal cases and levied $675,500 in penalties from fiscal 1995, down from $1.7 million in fines in 1993.
Michael McCabe, the EPA’s mid-Atlantic regional administrator, said the agency tries to encourage polluters to clean up voluntarily, but rigid enforcement by the states is needed as well.
Wetlands enforcement has dwindled sharply since Gov. Parris Glendening ordered a reorganization of environmental agencies that shifted wetlands, coal mines and waterways from the Department of Natural Resources to the Department of the Environment.
Arthur W. Ray, deputy environment secretary who oversees the agency’s enforcement efforts, blamed the reduction on the management shift. He also said some of the decline in penalties stems from better compliance with the laws, although he could not furnish information on how many pollution violations had been corrected voluntarily.
John Kabler dies, helped unite conservation groups
John V. Kabler, regional director of Clean Water Action and a leading environmental activist credited with helping to organize Maryland’s diverse conservation groups into a powerful force, died Aug. 1 of prostate cancer at his Annapolis home. He was 53.
Mr. Kabler’s accomplishments included a key role in the passage of most of Maryland’s major Chesapeake Bay legislation in the last 15 years, including nontidal wetlands protection, the ban on phosphate detergents and the Critical Areas program limiting waterfront development.
Mr. Kabler helped to create the Maryland Waste Coalition and the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, a group that endorses candidates based on their environmental records.
The Izaak Walton League honored Mr. Kabler as its conservationist of the year in 1988 and he received a citation as Admiral of the Chesapeake from Gov. Parris N. Glendening this year.
