Maryland Legislative Roundup 2024

By Evan Isaacson

Maryland’s 2024 legislative session has left a bad taste in the mouth of many environmental advocates. The session’s environmental legacy is more defined by what didn’t pass rather than what did. And at least one major bill that did pass could have irreversible consequences. Nevertheless, Chesapeake Legal Alliance is celebrating the passage of its two priority bills as well as several other new laws that will have a meaningful difference for Marylanders and our waterways.

Before jumping in with a summary of these wins, it’s important to recognize one underappreciated win: despite a highly challenging budget situation, the Moore Administration did preserve what we said last year may have been the biggest win of all for water quality, which was a major infusion of resources for the Maryland Department of the Environment. Last year, Governor Moore’s first budget included nearly 50 new positions for permit writers, inspectors, compliance staff, and new attorneys. The impact of these new positions is difficult to overstate as these individuals have the authority and capacity to halt more pollution than the Environmental Protection Agency, Chesapeake Legal Alliance, and all of our nonprofit partners combined. These individuals will conduct thousands of inspections per year, bring dozens, if not more than a hundred enforcement actions, and turn around the dramatic decline that the agency previously faced. The Governor could have clawed back the funding for the remaining unfilled positions, but did not. That is an important win itself.

But on to our big legislative wins. The first such victory was a powerful shot back at the U.S. Supreme Court, which dealt a major and generational blow to our beloved Clean Water Act. In the case of Sackett vs. EPA, the Court dramatically shrunk the scope of federal jurisdiction over our nation’s waters, leaving by most estimates, more than half of our nation’s surface waters and wetlands unprotected. In essence, the activists on the Court said to the states: “Here, we took power from the federal government and now it’s your job to protect water quality (or not).” Maryland’s response to the Court was swift, loud, and clear.

The Clean Water Justice Act of 2024, sponsored by Senator Malcom Augustine and Delegate Sara Love, may have been the first state legislative response to the Sackett decision in the county. Because each state has a somewhat (or, in some cases, dramatically) different set of state water pollution control and wetland protection laws, each state’s response to the Supreme Court’s invitation to the states will vary. Relative to many states, Maryland has a very robust set of water pollution and wetland laws and regulations. So, instead of creating entirely new regulatory regimes, what we knew Maryland needed to do to fill an immediate gap after the Sackett decision was ensure that every Marylander’s Clean Water Act right to stop illegal pollution was restored. Thus, the new law will ensure that wherever the federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction ends, that state jurisdiction will continue, along with that same right to put unlawful polluters on notice to cease and desist or risk a lawsuit. While little will change after this law – after all, it’s merely designed to put things back to the way they were before – it was nonetheless crucial to communicate that we will not allow the Supreme Court’s ideological decisions to harm Marylanders or their cherished waterways.

Our other legislative priority for the 2024 legislative session was passage of a bill to address a massive loophole that previously existed for the disposal of a substance called “industrial sludge,” which is also referred to variously as “food processing residuals” or “dissolved air floatation” (“DAF”). Basically, these are the leftovers from factories that reuse the leftover parts of slaughtered animals. While almost every other waste stream, including human wastes from sewage treatment plants and animal manures, are regulated in some form or fashion by environmental or agricultural regulators, this stuff has managed to largely escape oversight leading to both egregious localized impacts (an unbelievable stench and swarms of pests) and substantial regional water quality problems.

While surrounding states like Virginia and Delaware have regulatory programs to govern the hauling, storage, and land application of these wastes, Maryland did not. This resulted, according to a report from the University of Maryland Extension, in Maryland becoming a dumping ground for this large waste stream. And, as we have recently learned from a major new scientific study from leading Bay scientists, we will likely never be able to meet our Bay restoration goals without doing something about the regional “imbalances” in nutrient pollution – exactly the sort of thing that has been allowed to happen in parts of Maryland with millions of pounds of nitrogen pollution from industrial sludge. Thus, a bipartisan package consisting of Senate Bill 1074 and House Bill 991, sponsored by Senator Justin Ready and Delegate Sara Love, will create a comprehensive new regulatory framework comparable to surrounding states housed within the Maryland Department of Agriculture to bring Maryland up to par with surrounding states. As we told members of the General Assembly, we believe this will likely help stop Maryland from being this regional dumping ground and allow state officials to better manage our own homegrown waste streams, eliminating both the regional nutrient imbalance and hopefully some of those harmful impacts on Maryland’s rural communities.

Several other bills that we supported also passed. For example, the Protecting State Waters From PFAS Pollution Act is an important next step in Maryland’s ongoing legislative effort to halt PFAS pollution before it can find its way into our sewer systems and eventually waterways and the Bay. After previous failed attempts, Maryland also passed an update to its Comprehensive Flood Management Grant Program that authorized (but, unfortunately, has not yet required) significantly more funding for flood mitigation, with a critical minimum amount of such funding going toward underserved and overburdened communities. We were also pleased to see several bills pass that both restrict the toxins that can be used in the production of synthetic turf fields sold in Maryland and also provide greater oversight into the chain of custody of these fields which cause a lot of pollution, generate a lot of waste, and endanger children’s health.

Finally, we also want to note some of the important bills that we supported that did not pass. For example, our founder Russ Stevenson testified in support of a bill that would correct the significant ongoing injustice caused by Maryland’s unduly restrictive law of “standing to sue.” CLA has been in front of this effort to provide greater access to justice for Marylanders harmed by government decisions and we will continue this fight that asks nothing more than that Marylanders be given the same degree of access to state courts as they have in federal courts. We were also disappointed and surprised to see that the Agricultural BMP Best in Show program legislation did not make it through both houses. Similar to the industrial sludge bill, this bill would have represented another significant response to that major new scientific study of the Bay restoration effort, which, among other things, noted that our prior efforts to install pollution control “best management practices” (“BMPs”) have been scattered and ineffective and that we must do a much better job of siting the right BMP in the right place to meaningful reduce pollution, especially from agricultural sources. Given the support from all key agencies in Maryland and the fact that the bill passed through the Senate, we are hopeful this legislation will pass next year. Finally, we were disappointed and even more surprised to see that the Department of the Environment’s own bill to increase fees (not even really an increase given they were never adjusted for inflation) didn’t pass given the major fiscal challenges. We certainly expect this bill to be back next session and will once again support that effort and even push for more.

Overall, while there was a fair share of disappointment for environmental advocates in Maryland, we continue to be pleased by the legislative successes in recent years in Maryland that keep moving us ever closer to the day when we can finally say that water quality has been restored as our laws demand.