With a pair of Maryland state agencies coming to the rescue, the sewer moratorium in part of Baltimore’s suburbs has been lifted after just a few months.
Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman on June 3 announced an immediate end to the ban on new sewer connections in the northwestern portion of the county, which had threatened to stifle development there for years to come.
Wastewater from that area travels through a sewer line maintained by neighboring Baltimore County before being treated at the Patapsco Wastewater Treatment Plant in south Baltimore city.
Anne Arundel’s public works department announced an immediate moratorium on Feb. 26, saying that peak wastewater flows in that part of the county had exceeded the capacity of the sewer network to handle them — a situation that threatened to increase sewage overflows into the Patapsco River.
The sewer lines can handle average daily wastewater flows. But according to county officials, rainfall leaking into the aging, cracked pipes caused the peak flows to exceed limits set decades ago under an agreement Anne Arundel has with neighboring jurisdictions.
The moratorium applied to new residential and commercial development on three sides of Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, a regional travel and business hub that supports more than 100,000 jobs, according to BWI. County officials identified 18 projects in the planning pipeline that they said would be put on hold until the sewer capacity crunch could be eased.
When the moratorium was announced, officials said they would seek to divert wastewater flows from the city-owned Patapsco plant to one or more of Anne Arundel’s own treatment plants — a project that could take at least five years to complete. Pittman pledged nearly $60 million toward the effort in his proposed county budget for fiscal year 2027.
But county officials found a much quicker workaround. BWI also pipes its wastewater to the Patapsco treatment plant, and the airport is not using all the flow it is allowed under the multi-jurisdictional agreement that governs access to the regional sewer network. The Maryland Aviation Administration, which manages BWI, agreed to lend its unused sewer capacity to Anne Arundel while the county works to build the sewer lines that can divert wastewater elsewhere.
The Maryland Department of the Environment further eased the crunch by allowing the county to use different, somewhat lower measurements of its peak wastewater flows to the Patapsco plant.
Lifting the moratorium means that three development projects ready to hook up to the sewer system can go forward without delay.
Pittman thanked state officials and neighboring localities for “working with us to identify a regional solution that allows us to protect the Patapsco River while continuing to deliver the housing and the jobs that our region depends on.”
