The Maryland General Assembly is again considering legislation that would require additional studies, review and mitigation based on the cumulative impacts of a wide range of air and water permits.
SB 978 / HB 1484 would require the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) to assess and make a determination about whether a permitted activity would “contribute to an increased potential for adverse environmental or public health impacts.”
The bills would apply to intense activities, such as wastewater treatment plants and hazardous waste facilities, and to relatively minor activities, such as stormwater management on development sites, and air permits for restaurant grills, heating boilers, dry cleaners and backup power generators.
The cumulative impacts approach in the bills would replace the “technology based” regulatory approach currently employed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA,) MDE and local government permitting agencies.
Under the technology-based approach to protecting water quality, MDE is prohibited by federal and state law from issuing a permit for any activity that has reasonable potential to cause or contribute to conditions that exceed any applicable water quality standard.
To meet these requirements, MDE regulates stormwater runoff by requiring the installation of stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs). EPA, MDE and local government review authorities have scientifically verified the rate at which these technologies remove pollutants from stormwater runoff and apply those known efficiencies to ensure that the stormwater BMPs on individual development projects are as stringent as necessary to enforce water quality standards.
The current generation of stormwater BMPs not only ensures water quality standards are met but results in post-development loading rates for pollutants that are lower than EPA’s Chesapeake Bay TMDL target loads and often lower than the pre-development conditions.
The bills would apply these cumulative impact analysis requirements to permit applications located within a 1.5-mile radius from the boundary of a census tract that scores at or above the 75th percentile in the Maryland Environmental Justice Screening Tool. The Environmental Justice Screening Tool was developed by MDE to identify and map parts of the state that have a concentration of heavy industry and other indicators of social and economic stress.
While the tool does identify areas where intense uses are concentrated, it also identifies areas that have been designated for future growth, such as 10 transit-oriented development areas, 10 Purple Line stations, the Columbia Gateway Innovation District, the Odenton Town Center and much of the City of Baltimore.
The geographic application raises concerns about the bill creating inconsistencies between state and local land use priorities. This combined with the scientific challenges related to the permit review have caused the General Assembly to kill prior versions of cumulative impact analysis bills.
The fate of the 2025 version will be decided in the next five weeks.