Outlining Initiatives to Restore the Bay's Health
March 3, 2008
Female Speaker: Several years ago CBS issued a report entitled Help Wanted, Leadership For the Bay, in which we challenged our elected officials to provide much needed leadership.
Governor O'Malley, on behalf of our coalition partners, thank you for stepping up to the plate and providing this leadership. You have shown by watching BayStat and through your environmental legislative agenda this year, which includes Critical Area Reform, Energy Efficiency, the Chesapeake Bay 2010 Trust Fund, and the Global Warming Solution Act that together we have the most forward-thinking agenda we have seen in the last 20 years. (Applause.)
It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you today Governor Martin O'Malley. (Applause.)
Governor O'Malley: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you very, very much. It is great to be here with all of you. And spring's not quite here yet, is it? It's a chilly day on the Chesapeake Bay.
You know, as we stand here flanked by a number of our cabinet secretaries, I want to thank the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for their hard work and their leadership in encouraging all of us to exercise our freedom and our own personal responsibility to turn around the health of the Chesapeake Bay.
If you look at the scores, the health scores that the Chesapeake Bay has been getting over the last ten years, what you see is a trajectory of decline. And if we don't take greater action to reverse where the Chesapeake Bay is headed, the Bay is going to be extinct for all intents and purposes when it comes to supporting aquatic life, subaquatic vegetation and all of the things that have made us so proud as Marylanders to look at that State seal of the plowman and the fisherman living in harmony together.
If we don't take action, the Bay is going to die. The Bay right now is at a critical juncture. And we need to take greater action, in terms of our choices about the sort of sustained future that we want to have as a State. In terms of the type of energy we use, the manner in which we use the water, the manner in which we use the land and -- back again to energy -- what we do to the air.
To that end, we have been moving forward. The O'Malley/Brown administration, supported by strong leadership in the Speaker of the House and also the Senate President, and many others in the State legislature, to move forward on that sustainability agenda so that we reach a point in time where every year we see the Bay getting a little healthier, instead of the Bay getting a little sicker and moving into critical care.
In collaboration with members of the General Assembly, we've done a number of things already in just one year. What are those things? We've passed the Stormwater Management Act, along with the Clean Cars Act. We created the Climate Change Commission and joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to make our State a leader in the fight against global warming. We have together fully funded Program Open Space, and reinstituted the Office of Smart Growth. We set the Empower Maryland Goal to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent across the board in our State by 2015 and, most recently, we put into law and put some dollars into, for the first time, the creation of the Chesapeake Bay Trust Fund to take our efforts to a next level. Congratulations to all of you for those accomplishments. (Applause.)
But we had an interesting experience at the Board of Public Works last year as well, involving a huge development of some 1300 houses and a lot of impermeable surface with it that would have landed right on top of farmlands, woodlands, and wetlands adjacent to the Chesapeake Bay on Kent Island, firmly within the so-called Critical Areas Commission.
And as I talked to neighbors and I talked to Governor Hughes, who is going to be saying a
few words here just very shortly, we realized at that time that while the critical areas law was the best we could achieve at the time that it was implemented, clearly a situation like Four Seasons told all of us that we needed to update, upgrade and improve our laws in order to protect the critical areas.
Developers should not have to jump through 10 or 15 hoops, only to learn at the final turn in the bend, that plopping down 1300-some houses right next to the Chesapeake Bay is not good for the environment. It's called accumulated effect and that's what's been happening all around the critical areas, despite our best intentions 20, 30 years ago.
So this year we are calling upon the General Assembly to give greater force and strength to the protection of our critical areas. How are we proposing to do that? Number one, we are -- based on the lessons of the last 24 years, we need to do a better job of controlling the growth that is degrading and impacting our critical areas. To better manage growth this legislation will now require builders to either follow the law or risk losing their licenses. There is no reason for another house on the Magothy River Island to go forward without permits. (Applause.)
Secondly, to prevent short-sighted building right next to the water, the law would require that new homes in the vast majority of the critical area be at least 300 feet now from the water's edge.
To put an end to, number three, unrestrained growth near the water, the legislation now says that new growth should also be smart growth. In other words, that it should meet the standards that we have set for our State.
The protection of our title shorelands and habitats in Maryland is a shared responsibility. It's also a shared treasure. And it is also -- there are also 64 local jurisdictions that have land within the boundaries of the critical area. And most of whom are trying to do the best job they can to manage their programs with the tools they have.
But as it stands now, the critical area commission is not allowed to help them with enforcement. The legislation that we are asking the General Assembly to pass would give the Critical Areas Commission the enforcement authority and power that they need to protect our critical areas and it's high time we pass that law as Marylanders who care about the future of the Bay. (Applause.)
Now, back in 1984 we might not have had all of the answers and, you know what, today in 2008, we still don't have all of the answers. But we do have some better ideas about how we can better craft the laws and the choices we make as a free people to turn around the health of the Chesapeake Bay.
It is time to make the Critical Area law meaningful again, it is time for it to catch up also with the expectations that the people of our State have when it comes to the protection of the critical areas. During that Kent Island decision, I had scores of people come up to me on the street and scratch their head and say, isn't that already prohibited? Isn't that already an area that's protected? How can this happen?
Well, this is the march of progress. This is how we make a better future, by recognizing that while we had the will in 1984 to go as far as we did then, there is now even greater public will to go further and lead the way as the Marylanders that we are in the protection of our environment.
And there has been no leader who has inspired us more broadly or for a -- or in a more impactful way than the former Governor of our great State, he's my hero, he's a great mentor, a great leader, a great Marylander and a great American, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Governor Harry Hughes. (Applause.)
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