Howard County is a reliably blue jurisdiction, a place where Joe Biden outdistanced Donald Trump by more than 40 percentage points in 2022 and now-Gov. Wes Moore trounced MAGA acolyte Dan Cox with nearly 70% of the vote last year. Democrats swept the State House races, County Executive and all but one County Council seat.

It is a county where protestors swamped a recent Moms for Liberty meeting in a public library, demonstrating disgust with a group whose members were sharing organizational tips for how to remove books from schools.

Nonetheless, Moms for Liberty is carving a foothold in Howard County. An early backer of the group’s Howard County chapter is seeking a spot on the Howard County Board of Education, her chances bolstered by past election successes and strong name recognition.

Trent Kittleman is a former state delegate whose career includes stints as Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a term on the county’s Republican Central Committee and an unsuccessful run for County Executive in 2010. She is the widow of former State Sen. Robert Kittleman, and stepmother of former Howard County Executive Alan Kittleman – both known for their moderate views.

At age 78, and after a re-election defeat for delegate in 2022, Kittleman is now a candidate for school board representing County District 5 in western Howard County, the most conservative area in the county.

As the primary election draws closer, Kittleman has been distancing herself from Moms for Liberty. Her campaign website does not list her affiliation with the organization.

Lisa Geraghty, chair of the Howard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said Kittleman “asked to be taken off the rolls when she decided to run for school board.”

“I don’t think she wants to be associated with Moms for Liberty,” she said. “It’s a hot button problem and she doesn’t want to be associated with it. But her palm card is everything we believe.”

Kittleman has argued that grades should be “based on merit, not equity” and that Howard’s school system should “end equity-based redistricting and focus on building communities around schools.” She also calls for greater parental rights and removing “identity politics and political ideologies from the school system.”

And although Howard school officials say they do not teach Critical Race Theory, a graduate school theory that holds that racism is built into the system’s laws and rules, Kittleman insists that what she calls the “genteelisms” educators use and in policy documents have “enshrined” CRT in the schools.

She points in newsletter articles she wrote during her time in the House of Delegates to phrases educators use, such as “interrupting racism,” “cultural proficiency/relevance,” “critical ethnic studies,” and “diversity and inclusion” as evidence that the theory is being taught.

Kelly Klinefelter Lee, a teacher and president of the Howard Progressive Project, a liberal group, called it “shocking” and “alarming” to “think about Moms for Liberty and what it stands for in Howard County. Its values are retrograde.”

In an interview, Kittleman says she became interested in Moms for Liberty when she left the General Assembly in 2022 and was looking to get involved in education advocacy.

“I was going to start a chapter,” she recalled. “I fell in love with all the people. I thought they were reasonable and rational. But then I saw they were being called a terrorist group. You can’t get associated with that.”

Since its founding in 2021, Moms for Liberty has surged in popularity among some and generated anger from others for its efforts to elect right-wing school board candidates, to target references to race and LGBTQ+ identity in classrooms around the nation, and to have books removed from school libraries.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty as an anti-government extremist group in June 2023, arguing it uses parents’ rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ+ students. Moms for Liberty leaders argue the efforts to fund and endorse candidates in school board races show it is not anti-government.

Kittleman said that she supports school choice and complained that county leaders are “not supporting our schools” but rather “supporting teachers’ unions.”

“The failure of Baltimore City schools is the failure of the radical left, the liberal left, kowtowing to the unions,” Kittleman said.

Geraghty, the local group president, said her chapter hasn’t endorsed candidates in the May 14 primary but will get involved in the November General Election.

Klinefelter Lee, the progressive group president, said she is not surprised Kittleman “plays down” her Moms for Liberty connection.

“The name Moms for Liberty is not popular in Howard County,” Klinefelter Lee says. “She’s a savvy pol and she will not be advertising their [potential] endorsement.”

Kittleman is one of three candidates for the school board seat that shares boundaries with the district with the only Republican on the County Council. School board races are technically non-partisan, but many educated voters and those involved in education affairs typically have a clear understanding of the ideology of those running.

Kittleman’s opponents in the May 5 primary are focusing on school budgets, maintenance, and a chaotic start to the 2023 school year – not culture war issues. Thousands of Howard County public school students were stuck without a school bus ride to school because a California tech company hired to solve transportation problems failed to provide enough buses to cover all the routes.

Speaking about the school bus crisis at the start of the year, candidate Andrea Chamblee said the school system administration “got hoodwinked by hard pressure salespeople.” Chamblee, whose mother taught in Howard County schools and who worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said “somebody believed hype from a bus company. I spent my career not believing the hype.”

As a professional government administrator, “you look at systems for tracking mistakes and if you don’t see any systems, you know they don’t know how to do it. I know how to audit vendors, make sure they are held accountable and it’s a place where I can add value.”

Chamblee grew up in Howard County and moved back after her husband, John McNamara, was killed in the June 2018 shooting at the Capital Gazette newspapers in Annapolis. She also talks about school safety—“my nieces and nephews hate shooter drills; they end up in tears because of thinking what happened to John”—and the maintenance of Howard’s aging school buildings.

“They might look good from the outside,” she says. “But we’ve put off maintaining, much less repair things. We have HVAC problems, masonry problems, paving which can be dangerous for our kids, windows, roofs, emergency generators. It’s quite a list.”

The third candidate in the race, Catherine (Cat) Carter, a long-time education advocate, says she sees “things that are broken and I want to fix them.”

She worries, she says, about a decline in school spending as part of the county budget. It dropped from an average of 58 percent of the county budget in 2009 to 54 percent in 2022 and is now down to 52.5 percent.

“We are down by a significant amount our spending on schools,” she says. “So, the question I’m asking is: What’s going on? Why did the spending drop?”

Kittleman filed to run for the school board seat last June. Chamblee and Carter filed within a week of each other in January.

“Everybody else was standing on the sidelines waiting to see who else would get in,” said Chamblee, who filed to run January 16. “I thought, I have the experience, I should get involved.”

Carter, who filed to run a week after Chamblee, said people began asking her in October to get in the school board race. She said yes in November, but “didn’t hear back” from anyone. Then she heard “someone else was running,” she recalled, and wondered if she should be a third person and finally settled on “they need me.”

“I see things broken and I want to fix them. And I have a long history of doing that,” she said. “And I have skin in the game,” she added referring to her five children, four of them in Howard County schools. She conceded it’s “going to be a hard race” against a Moms for Liberty opponent in the most conservative district in the county. But she said she wasn’t worried that she and Chamblee would split the more liberal voters, paving the way for Kittleman.  The two top vote getters in the non-partisan May 5 primary go up against each other in November.

At 20 years old, Connor White is the youngest elected member of Baltimore County’s Democratic Central Committee. He’s a Quaker and grew up attending Friends meetings where participants, he said, “were always involved in politics.”

“You know, write your congressman about this thing or the other thing,” White said. So, naturally, he kept it up. He said he wants to “help make change” and to “have the central committee be the beating heart of the Democratic party” in the county where he lives.

Kira Bender, 24, grew up with a father who was heavily involved in Republican politics in Carroll County. That drew her to student government at South Carroll High School; to an internship with State Sen. Justin Ready, the minority whip in the Maryland Senate; and jobs with an Annapolis-based marketing firm that counts several national GOP figures among its clients.

She has always loved politics and community service. It makes her feel good “when something gets done.” But she worries that “so many people are apathetic.”

“When people complain about the way things are going, I say, ‘Do you vote? If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.’”

White and Bender are among a growing number of Gen Z young adults — defined as those ages 18 to 25 — getting involved in politics, many of them on the local level where their impact can be quickly felt.

These younger activists have come of age during a time of school shootings, climate crises, gender and sexuality issues, and the Trump era. They often don’t like the system, but are nonetheless starting to work inside it. According to Tufts University, 41 million additional Gen Z members will be eligible to vote in 2024, and the decisions this group makes could shape the future politics of the nation.

Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Washington, D.C. think tank Public Religion Institute, writes in a recent study that Gen Z is the “most racially and ethnically diverse generation in our nation’s history” and are “coming into their own politically, socially, and culturally, bringing their values and viewpoints to their communities and workplaces, and to our nation’s political system.”

That report, based on a national survey as well as an analysis of 10 focus groups, found that nearly half (43%) of Gen Z adults don’t identify with either major political party, while those that do, lean toward the Democrats rather than Republicans—36% to 21%.

“In the data we’ve compiled, the more conservative GenZers, the Republicans, are not as engaged as the liberals,” Deckman said in an interview. “It’s hard to get younger people involved. They don’t want to hang out with a lot of older people who are heavily MAGAfied and a lot of young people are turned off by that. There’s a lot of GenZers who think the problems won’t get better until there are more young people in office, that they get the old people out of the way,” she said. “They feel that older people don’t understand their problems, their issues.”

White, who identifies himself as “a queer man,” says he is “very worried” about the direction the U.S. is headed. “Will I ever be able to buy a house, retire? Will I be able to marry the person I love? For me and for young people, the Democratic party will help that.”

The issue of getting older people out of the way bubbled to the surface in Maryland last November when a coalition of Gen Z Democrats from Baltimore and Howard counties tried to block the election of former Howard County Executive Ken Ulman as state party chairman In a sharply worded letter, they said the policies Ulman supported as member of the county council and the executive “greatly contributed to the current housing unaffordability, income and wealth inequality, food insecurity, decline in school quality, and various other serious crises that are currently plaguing Howard County.”

Strongly backed by Gov. Wes Moore, Ulman won the post. (Ulman is a part-owner of Baltimore Fishbowl.) But Ed Crizer, the Gen Z Democrat who ran against him, is still in the fight. He represents the Essex, Dundalk, Middle River area on the Baltimore County Democratic Central Committee and he’s running for chair of the state central committee.

“There seems to be a disproportionate number of older people in politics, and they may have more moderate views on the direction of the party,” argues the 22-year-old. “Young people see the need for more change.”

But Ruben Amaya, who is also 22 and third vice-chair of the state Democratic central committee, doesn’t see it in such stark terms. “Young people have a lot to learn,” he says. But at the same time, they “have a lot to offer.”

Amaya came in fourth in a race for three spots on the Democratic ballot for the House of Delegates in 2022 in the same district as House Speaker Adrienne Jones.

“I wanted to show folks that young people can be involved, can have a seat at the table,” he says. “And coming fourth for my first time running, that showed I was able to move people.”

Like many in his generation, Amaya says he’s more interested in state and local politics than national politics because the issues involved transcend national politics.

“And when I look at the dysfunction in Washington, I think I can do more in local politics,” he added. “People forget there are important positions on the board of education and other local offices. My goal is I would like to see more young people hold positions on those local boards.”

Deckman says that while Gen Z concerns—reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues—tend to be more national, “state and local politics are getting more nationalized in our more polarized world, more ideologically consistent.”

At the same time, Deckman says her study shows there is “a definite correlation between gender and sexuality and how that relates to engagement in politics.”

“During the Trump years, we saw more young women getting involved than young men. Now, that’s changed and we’re seeing more men getting involved and more LGBTQ people. And GenZ is part of that.”

She says the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which held there is no constitutional right to abortion, and the rise of the religious right moved many younger voters to action and to the Democrats.

 “Whenever there is a feeling that rights are being threatened, we see an increase in involvement of young people,” she explained. “Whether it’s LGBTQ issues, the Black Lives Matter movement, at least among younger adults.”

But Cross Ritchey, a 22-year-old member of the Garrett County Republican Central Committee, says he sees GenZ Democrats as “one issue” people.

He says they “hitch their wagon” to one social issue, whether it be reproductive rights or LGBT issues, “and that’s their end-all and be all.”

“And when you stick to one issue, you don’t see the whole picture; you don’t see the big picture.”

Ritchie, who graduated from Frostburg State with a political science degree and is pursuing a master’s in national security, says he grew up in a very conservative area of the state in a deeply conservative and religious family and was excited he was old enough to vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

He and Bender, both officers in Maryland Young Republicans, say people get more conservative as they “get older, more mature.”

On the other hand, White, who says his dream is to turn his northern Baltimore County councilmanic district blue, acknowledges there are some active conservative Gen Z types, but he says they are fewer in numbers and more influenced by money.

“There’s a plethora of money involved in Republican politics and most young people don’t go for that,” he says.

One thing they seem to agree on is the need to listen to those on the other side.

“All my friends at school were Democrats, were more liberal than I was,” says Bender. “My roommates were Democrats and were pretty liberal. It was interesting to see their different perspectives.”

Amaya, who is turned off by the dysfunction in Washington, says he has conversations with young, conservative friends about their beliefs.

“I think what’s missing in our political culture is dialogue,” he argues “I don’t know where they’re coming from if I don’t talk to them. To bridge the gaps is to have conversation.”

For the first time since taking office, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball is turning to an independent contractor to help secure state funding for county projects and has selected omnipresent Annapolis lobbyist Bruce Bereano for the task.

State records show that Bereano began his work for the county administration on Jan. 3, 2024. Ball’s office did not disclose how much Bereano will be paid, or whether the selection was made through a competitive process.

Bereano’s hiring has raised eyebrows among some who follow Howard County affairs, particularly because the county has traditionally been well-positioned to secure state funding for priorities. The Howard County Legislative Delegation in Annapolis includes Sen. Guy Guzzone, chairman of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, a Democrat who is close to Ball.

Bereano is expected to focus in part on flood mitigation projects in Ellicott City, including an expensive tunnel that would carry water under Main Street to the Patapsco River that is part of Ball’s “Safe and Sound” plan.

Guzzone said appropriations for the tunnel and other Ellicott City projects may not necessarily come before his committee. He called it a “miscellaneous” item that could appear in the capital budget. Nonetheless, Guzzone said he “absolutely supports the county executive” in bringing on a contracted lobbyist, though he doesn’t know why Ball hired Bereano.

In an interview, Bereano said that “Annapolis is all about relationships.”

“This is my 52^nd legislative session and I have a depth and breadth of relationships,” he said. “I’m very flattered that the county executive asked me if I could help.”

Bereano, 78, is regarded as one of the most visible and occasionally polarizing figures in Annapolis. He is known for hosting lavish events for lawmakers, chartering buses to the Eastern Shore so friends, allies and legislators can feast on crabs and fixings in a private tent at the annual Tawes Crab & Clam Bake in Crisfield. He tried for more than two decades to have his law license restored after it was stripped in the 1990s following a federal fraud conviction related to campaign finance misdeeds. The consummate Annapolis survivor, he became a close ally of former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan prior to the election of Wes Moore.

State records show that Bereano earned $1.9 million from clients in the year ending Oct. 31, 2023, putting him in the top tier of his profession. The Office of the Howard County Executive now joins 53 other clients represented by Bereano in Annapolis, list that includes Blind Industries & Services of Maryland; St. Mary’s County commissioners; Ocean City; Martin’s Caterers; and the Maryland Wholesale Medical Cannabis Trade Association. Records show those clients pay him a range of fees, frequently starting at $15,000 per legislative session. Bereano also represents Caroline, Washington and Queen Anne’s counties.

Gov. Wes Moore’s capital budget, released Wednesday, includes $38.5 million for Ellicott City flood mitigation projects.

“The county needs a lot of money for these very important projects and I’m going to work cooperatively and harmoniously with the county delegation to make that happen,” Bereano said.

Howard County already has cobbled together more than $200 million in local, state and federal funds over several years for the projects, which include five storm water retention ponds, the tunnel under Main Street and a culvert to carry water to the river. The tunnel is the costliest and most contentious and disruptive, and requires approval from the CSX railroad to cross its right-of-way, which has not yet been granted.

Mark Miller, Howard County’s public information administrator, praised the county’s “collaborative delegation” in an emailed statement, saying the members are “constantly working on behalf of our county and state.”

Noting that the county does not employ a full-time lobbyist, he added that it is “important for us to have someone who can effectively work with our delegation members, the Governor’s Office, and other leaders to ensure that we can still move our priorities forward even as the state faces fiscal challenges.”

The County Executive does has a governmental affairs director, Maureen Evans Arthurs, who has significant Annapolis experience.

Maryland lawmakers returned to Annapolis last week for their annual legislative session facing hundreds of millions of dollars in structural budget deficits over the next five years, foreshadowing steep cuts in state spending and potential tax hikes.

Miller said in his statement the county needs “the state’s support” to complete the flood mitigation projects and that County Executive Ball will continue to work with the county delegation “and our other Maryland General Assembly partners as we manage these fiscal challenges without compromising our overall quality of life.”

He pointed specifically to Guzzone and Democrats Del. Courtney Watson, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Katie Fry Hester, a member of the Senate Education, Energy and Environment Committee. Watson’s and Hester’s district includes Ellicott City.

Ellicott City, a historic mill town on the Tiber Branch, a tributary of the Patapsco, has suffered two deadly flash floods in less than a decade, one in 2016 and another in 2018, that caused millions of dollars in damage to shops and businesses along Main Street.

Two major retention ponds have been completed since then, one is to be built this summer and a fourth pond is being designed. The fifth pond, as well as the tunnel and culvert are in the final design and permitting stages.

Neither Deb Jung, the County Council chair, nor Liz Walsh, whose County Council district includes Ellicott City, returned repeated calls for comment.

Every year about this time, crews from Maryland’s and Virginia’s natural resources departments head out onto the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries on boats. Workers are dredging the muddy bottom in the water for crabs, not for the steamer, but for research. It’s called the winter dredge survey. State employees use the information they get to develop harvest regulations for commercial crabbers.

Shaun Miller, a biologist with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, says they have to do it in the winter because that’s when crabs hibernate, when they “bury themselves in the mud.”

Miller said that winter is ideal because, “this is the only time of the year that they’re not mobile,” he explained. “If we tried to do the same thing and get an estimate during the summertime, it’d be impossible.”

Genine McClair, who runs the Maryland Department of Natural Resource’s blue crab program, says the survey is the first of three steps. They use the results to develop a management program and then they do research.

“And that’s really just us partnering with academic institutions or other scientists in the region to identify knowledge gaps when it comes to blue crabs and help to fill those knowledge gaps,” McClair said.

On a recent gray January morning, they were working a section of the upper Chesapeake Bay off Rock Hall on the Eastern Shore.

Capt. Roger Morris, a Dorchester County waterman who works under contract with the state’s department of natural resources, dropped a Virginia dredge off the stern of Mydra Ann, his 45-foot Bay workboat, and let the attached chain pay out until the dredge hit bottom 20-some feet below, jolting the boat. A Virginia dredge refers to an eight foot wide piece of equipment with an attached net that gets dropped into the water to dredge for crabs. Morris eased the throttle forward and dragged the dredge through the mud for one minute at three knots, then hauled it back up, pausing to rinse the mud out before bringing it on board.

McClair and John Murphy, Morris’s crewman, flip the net to empty it onto a wide wooden platform and begin sorting on their hands and knees through an array of shells, searching for blue crabs. Nothing.

But it’s only the first stop on a trip that will take them from the Eastern to Western shore, off the mouths of the Patapsco and Magothy rivers and back to Kent Narrows, about 45 miles southeast of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, by the end of the day.

Read more at WYPR.

Environmental activists pushing for more development of offshore wind turbines in the Atlantic ocean released a report exploring potential economic windfalls for electric consumers in Maryland. The new report estimates that if regulators approve 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind projects, three times as much that’s already permitted, electric consumers may see a smaller bill. That calculation is based on what’s known as the standard offer service rate, which is how much electric utility companies charge, but does not include extra fees or other considerations.

New Jersey-based energy consulting firm Gable Associates, estimates that by 2031 if Maryland bets big on offshore wind the price for standard offer service could drop from 8 cents per kilowatt to 4 cents per kilowatt.

The type of electricity generation that costs 8 cents per kilowatt is a mix of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The largest net electricity generation in Maryland by source is natural gas-fired power plants, as of August 2022, according the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The second most common source is nuclear power, followed by non-hydroelectric renewable energy, federal data shows. 

Isaac Gabel-Frank, a vice president of the firm and the lead author of the study, said there would be other benefits from reducing pollution as offshore wind could replace fossil fuel burning electricity generators.

“There’s a lot of air pollution avoided,” he said. “When quantified in a monetary way, it could be $24 billion over the [30-year] period of offshore wind.”

The Gable Associates report was released by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. It was funded by The Clayton Baker Foundation and the Abell Foundation.

While the report’s findings rely on the estimate of 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind being pumped into the electric grid, the Maryland Public Service Commission has approved permits for roughly 2,000 megawatts.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

There was a time when utility companies urged customers to “switch to clean burning natural gas” for home energy needs. But studies over the last 10 years have shown it’s not so clean burning after all. And that has environmental advocates questioning why the Maryland Energy Administration would be offering $9.25 million in grants to expand natural gas infrastructure statewide.

“There are studies that show that when you take into account all the work that goes into extracting and to burning the gas in your home, it’s as dirty as coal as far as fossil fuel emissions,” said Emily Scarr, director of the advocacy group Maryland PIRG. “Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.”

The grant, she complained, would subsidize the natural gas industry to expand their services.

“I don’t think the government needs to be putting their hand on the scale in that way for technology that is so dangerous and dirty and counter to our state’s goals for global warming emissions,” she said.

The organization wrote Monday to Gov. Larry Hogan and Mary Beth Tung, director of the energy administration, urging them to withdraw the grants.

Eligible grant applicants range from commercial or industrial users like utility companies or any organization such as school districts to expand natural gas infrastructure. The goal is to achieve cleaner air standards and promote economic growth and development, according to an energy administration press release. A little more than a third of it – $2.6 million – has been prioritized for the Southern Maryland counties of St. Mary’s, Charles and Calvert, and Frederick County in Western Maryland.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Most races during the Maryland midterm election already have winners but Anne Arundel County is one of the few jurisdictions with a sizable population that won’t start canvassing mail-in ballots until Nov. 10, delaying results for three key races in the region. The tightly contested county executive race and two state house races in Anne Arundel County remained too close to call on Tuesday night and even Wednesday morning. Officials said they won’t begin counting more than 40,000 mail-in ballots until Thursday.

In the county executive race, Republican County Council member Jessica Haire held a nearly 11,000 vote lead over incumbent Democrat Steuart Pittman, according to Maryland State Board of Elections data.

In the state senate District 33 race, Democrat Dawn Gile trailed two-term Republican Del. Sid Saab by less than 2,000 votes in the race for an open Senate seat that has long been held by the GOP.

And Del. Heather Bagnall, a Democrat who broke through the red wall to win a House seat in that district four years ago was a little more than 1,000 votes behind Republican Keith Gillespie.

County executive Pittman said he was confident of the outcome, despite the lead Haire holds after in person voting.

“We know what happened in early voting, and we know what happened in mail-in,” he said. “And so, we’re in a very good place.”

Pittman had a 3,000-vote lead after early voting and mail-in voters tend to be heavily Democratic.

Read more at WYPR.

Marshyhope Creek, a quiet, tidal estuary on the Eastern Shore, is the only place in Maryland where sturgeon, an endangered fish species that has been around since prehistoric times, are known to spawn. And environmentalists fear that plans for a giant, $300 million indoor salmon farm that would discharge millions of gallons of water a day into the creek could mean the end of the sturgeon.

The fear stems from discharges of the cold, potentially salty water – salmon are a cold water species – into the warm, freshwater creek that would upset the delicate balance necessary for the local fish to spawn. And they question whether the state Department of the Environment, which has issued a draft permit for the water discharge, can successfully regulate such an operation.

The size of the building – 25 acres under one roof – is intimidating enough. That’s more than six Super Walmarts in an industrial park on the outskirts of Federalsburg in rural Caroline County. When it’s fully operational, the Norwegian business AquaCon plans to harvest 35 million pounds of salmon a year using recirculated water, and discharge more than two million gallons a day of wastewater into the Marshyhope.

Lee Currey, director of the Maryland Department of the Environment’s water and science division, told residents during a recent public hearing on the project his office had “never dealt with something like this, and at this scale.”

That caught the attention of Al Girard, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Eastern Shore director. Girard called the project “uncharted territory,” not just because of the discharge of water, but also because of the stormwater running off that giant roof.

“There are a lot of questions,” Girard said. “The MDE really needs to deny this permit and take several steps back so it can ensure that water quality is not harmed in Maryland.”

David Secor, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science lab at Solomons, worries that a production facility of that size has never been tested anywhere.

“There’s no track record in terms of the management strategies and contingency plans,” Secor fretted.

The MDE’s Currey said that while the department hasn’t dealt with anything of this size, there’s a lot of information available on recirculating aquaculture systems and that his agency is “familiar with water quality standards.”

Department officials are confident, “that the limits we propose and the special conditions we have in the permit provide all the safeguards necessary,” he said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

The Chesapeake Bay’s marshes have been called the lungs of the bay. They provide habitat for fish and waterfowl. The marshes clean polluted bay waters and slow the power of floods and storms.

That’s why the scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center are studying how to preserve marshes in face of rising sea levels prompted by climate change.

At the end of a narrow winding road in southern Anne Arundel County where a vast marsh stretches on seemingly forever scientists are working on solutions. There are stands of reed grasses known as phragmites at some spots, but mostly it’s covered by bulrush and salt meadow grass.

But this is no ordinary marsh.

Instead, it’s dotted with plexiglass squares and cylinders with infrared lamps to maintain different temperatures inside each square. Pipes snake through the water, pumping carbon dioxide at different rates into each of the squares. It’s part of a carefully controlled experiment to figure out how best to preserve Chesapeake marshes.

Roy Rich, one of the scientists conducting the studies, says they are “basically constantly measuring the amount of CO2 going into those plots.”

They’re adjusting levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, “up and down to basically create an environment within those chambers that’s at about 750 parts per million of extra CO2,” Rich said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Kelly Schulz’s campaign for the Republican nomination for governor is warning its supporters that Democrats may soon be meddling in their primary.

In one letter to supporters, Schulz senior campaign advisor Doug Mayer suggested that the Democratic party has focused advertisements against more moderate players instead of fringe Republicans who would have no chance during a general election in November.

The Democratic Governors Association, also known as the DGA, has spent $12 million in Illinois on attack ads to stop a Black Republican U.S. Army veteran from battling the incumbent in the fall. His competition in Illinois has already touted allegiance to former President Donald Trump.

Maryland could be next on the DGA hit list to make Trump-backed Dan Cox the GOP nominee, warned Schulz’s campaign advisor.

“All of which is to one end goal, which is to defeat Kelly Schulz, so they can end up facing a very fringe Republican in the general election,” Mayer said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Maryland’s Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to ban Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a group of human-made chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency says can cause harmful health effects in humans.

The bill banning the substances is named for former Calvert County firefighter George Walter Taylor, who died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 46. An autopsy determined the cancer was caused at least partially by the PFAS found in firefighting foam and in the gear that he had used since he became a volunteer firefighter when he was 15.

PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down. They are found not only in firefighting foam, but also in food containers and even carpeting.

They create a barrier between grease and oil and whatever is beneath it. They prevent greasy food from leaking through takeout containers and they smother fires.

Read more at WYPR.

There appeared to be enthusiastic support for reducing Maryland’s carbon footprint at a Senate committee hearing Tuesday. But some weren’t so sure the Climate Solutions bill before them was the way to do it.

Michael Powell, a lawyer for a building trades group, told the Senate’s environment committee everyone supports climate change legislation. But some of the provisions of the bill, for example retrofitting some buildings to be all electric, were just unworkable.

“It doesn’t take an architect to think that if you have a 15 or 20 story building, and it’s heated by a boiler in the basement and radiators and hot water, that converting all of that to electricity for heating is going to be difficult,” he said.

Charles Washington, a lobbyist for BGE, said his company supports decarbonization and has announced its own plans to cut its emissions by 50% by 2030. They’re committed to helping their customers reduce emissions as well, he added.

But no other state in the country has adopted a building code that requires such a quick transition from natural gas to electricity, he said..

“The states and smaller jurisdictions that are considering decarbonization policies better account for the challenges, the feasibility and the range of options and economic impacts inherent in such a transformational shift,” he said. “This bill goes too far, too fast.”

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

The legislative drive to legalize recreational cannabis in Maryland during this General Assembly session opened Monday with supporters of two House of Delegate bills arguing they would help right past wrongs.

Opponents, however, warned in a House committee hearing they would only lead to more trouble.

The first bill is a simple state constitutional amendment that would legalize recreational cannabis for anyone over 21. It would have to be approved by three-fifths votes in the House and Senate and at a referendum in November.

The second is a sweeping bill that lays out requirements for studies and creates a cannabis business assistance fund to help small, minority and women owned businesses. Del. Luke Clippinger, the bill’s sponsor, said it provides the first step to building a licensing structure to encourage minority owned businesses.

“We need to learn from our mistakes of the past,” he said, “because we cannot repeat the debacle that took place during the rollout of Maryland’s medical cannabis licenses.”

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

The enforcement and inspection crews at Maryland’s Department of the Environment are woefully understaffed, a situation that could lead to a Flint, Michigan, style water crisis here, state Attorney General Brian Frosh has warned.

Frosh told the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs committee Tuesday that the number of employees in the department’s enforcement sections has dropped significantly since 2015. The problem, he said, is agency wide, but particularly acute in the water supply system.

Citing a May 2021 EPA report, Frosh said Maryland once had a robust drinking water safety program that went above and beyond the minimum federal requirements.

“But now,” he added, quoting from the report, “due to declining resources, increasing demands in the need to make cutbacks MDE may not be able to meet the minimum requirements needed to maintain primary enforcement responsibilities.”

Frosh said the EPA report found that Maryland should have 126 employees dedicated to inspecting the state’s 3,300 drinking water systems but has barely a third of that number. That means those systems only get inspected, every three to five years instead of the recommended 12 to 18 months.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Maryland lawmakers returned to Annapolis Wednesday to take on a number of issues, among them, the legalization of recreational cannabis. Last fall, a Goucher poll found that 60 percent of Marylanders favor legalizing marijuana.

But the House and Senate are taking sharply different approaches.

The House of Delegates is proposing a constitutional amendment that would go before voters in the November election. The amendment would allow those 21 and older to “use and possess cannabis.” But it wouldn’t go into effect until July 2023, after lawmakers have crafted rules for its use, possession, distribution and taxation.

House Speaker Adrienne Jones says it’s important to “get the input from Maryland citizens” first.

“We’ve done polling that shows that a majority of Marylanders support legal cannabis and we’re going to put it on the ballot for the voters to decide,” she said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.