Story Category: Live Updates »

Dear Editor;

On Monday evening I attended a meeting the Charles County Planning Commission. In their citizen participation before their meeting, I cited to them the nursery rhyme about “for the want of a nail a shoe was lost... the kingdom was lost all for the want of a horseshoe nail” to drive home to them the interconnectivity of systems, ecological and economic. Despite that they proceeded to adapt measures that essentially kept the same comprehensive plan as 2006. As a result of that meeting I gave the following statement to the board of commissioners in their weekly public forum. I hope that they took it to heart.

Over a year ago in this very room, the Board of Commissioners promised that the development of the 2012 comprehensive plan would be a transparent process with extensive citizen input. So there was a plan-kick off meeting on March 29, 2011. Throughout May and June there were four regional visioning sessions with extensive citizen participation outlining what they wanted in the plan. A website was set up with a forum for eliciting citizen comment about the comprehensive plan. There were four Regional Design charettes throughout July and August, where the consultants presented some first draft distillations of the desires of the citizenry expressed in the visioning sessions, to elicit more citizen comment and assistance in further formulating their desired view of the comprehensive plan. In October, an open house was held to present the consultants work product incorporating the citizen comments received thus far and garner yet more citizen input. A Public hearing was held in December to present the merged product of all of the citizen inputs for the comprehensive plan and get even more citizen comments. I was at a number of these meetings as were people as diverse as Mr. Vince Hungerford, and the Mayor and Town Council of Indian Head. I do not recall seeing any of the Planning Commissioners.

The consultants at ERM and the County staff of the Office of Planning spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of man-hours setting up and running these meetings and the website and then evaluating, distilling and synthesizing all the citizen input to come up with a plan that represented the expressed desires of the citizens. After all of that, the Planning Commission last night essentially said, “We don't care what the citizens said. We don't care what the citizens want. We are going to keep in place the 2006 comprehensive plan.”Or in effect, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin’s characterization of the Bell Telephone monopoly, “We're the Planning commission. We don't care because we don't have to.”

The consultants warned in their presentations that the recommendations they had made in their merged scenario included many of the standards determined by the Maryland Departments of Natural Resources and the Environment, and the Army Corps of Engineers; and that although there were no current legal obligations to follow those standards it was more than likely that would not always be the case. They also warned that preliminary estimates of the cost to Anne Arundel and Calvert counties to implement the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation plan indicated it was going to cost them each over a billion dollars to carry out the clean-up required by the plan. But the Commissioners Grasso, Jones, and Mitchell did not listen. They instead chose to continue doing the business as usual that brought us the disapprobation of the Maryland Department of the Environment, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Then, in the most egregious comments of the night, Commissioner Grasso and Vice Chairman Richards both stated, “We've done well in protecting the Mattawoman Creek.” For the last four years I have worked as a volunteer with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to carry out Macro-Invertebrate sampling of streams in Charles County to access their health. In addition, over the past three years, I worked as a volunteer to help with their fish egg sampling in the Mattawoman Creek during the herring runs, to access the level of the fish populations there.In these few years I have seen a significant downturn in the quality of these streams. Last year and this year there were streams that literally turned my stomach to have to walk in and put my hands in; even with waders and rubber gloves. This year on the Mattawoman Creek, I have been revolted by the odor of raw sewage emanating from the surface of the creek. At other times I have seen signs warning people not to go into the water because the Mattawoman Sewage Treatment Plant (our supposedly modern state of the art plant on which the Water Resources Element relies), had overflowed into the creek.15 years ago according to our team lead, during the fish egg sampling there were hundreds of eggs in each of the sample jars and the Mattawoman Creek was full of fish.When I got involved in 2010, there were only a few eggs in the jars on only a few weeks. And I never saw a fish until the last two weeks of sampling when there were swarms visible, and people were catching them with buckets.In 2011, I only saw one fish during the entire 12 weeks of sampling, and there were only a few eggs in the jars on a couple of weeks.So far this year I have seen no fish and we've had only one occasion where there was one egg in the jar.I have not seen a yellow perch egg strand since 2010.This year in our Macro-Invertebrate sampling we also worked the Piscataway Creek watershed, widely acknowledged to be a highly impaired stream. I found it to be on about the same level as the several of the sites in Charles county and much better than one of the tributaries of the Mattawoman, the stream that Councilman Grasso maintains “we've done so much to protect”.

At the November 2010, meeting for the review of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan, I expressed great concern that its enforcement was being left to the same county officials who have done so much to undermine the protection of the watersheds in their counties. Commissioner Collins got up to dispute that contention and to try and defend the county's record of watershed protection.Now with this decision by the Planning Commission it is obvious that they have no serious intention of protecting the watersheds of county, or carrying out any serious implementation of the Watershed Implementation Plan until forced to do so by the state or federal governments.By that time, the billion dollar price tag being faced by Calvert and Anne Arundel counties may seem like a bargain basement price.What a legacy to bequeath to succeeding generations.

Edward R. Joell

Indian Head, MD 20640

April 10, 2012