Five states in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Improvement Area, including Maryland and Virginia, plus the District of Columbia, will soon be put on a mandatory “pollution diet” that will squeeze tens of billions of dollars from struggling state and local economies. Environmental Protection Agency Mid-Atlantic Region director David Sternberg told The Washington Examiner that “EPA is in the process of developing estimates of the costs/benefits” for the Total Maximum Daily Load that will be allowed to enter the Bay, which President Obama declared a “national treasure” in a May 2009 executive order. Judging by preliminary estimates, those costs will be enormous.
Prince George’s County alone expects to spend $800 million over the next decade just on the urban component of its Watershed Implementation Plan, said Samuel Wynkoop Jr., director of the county’s Department of Environmental Resources. The money will mostly be spent to prevent storm water runoff from entering the Bay.
Wynkoop estimates it will cost up to $100,000 per acre to implement “low-impact” strategies, such as building detention ponds and planting trees and rain gardens, to meet Maryland’s pollution diet timetable, which is even more stringent than EPA’s.
In the final WIP due March 30, 2012, Prince George’s is expected to quadruple the pollution reductions it has already made.
“This is an extraordinary cost, and I don’t believe the state has given full consideration to how this is going to be funded,” Wynkoop bluntly acknowledged. One recommendation under consideration: a new utility fee that will increase housing costs in a county that still leads the state in foreclosures.
A Virginia Senate Finance Committee report estimated that even though the commonwealth has already spent $5 billion to clean up the Bay, the “pollution diet” will cost taxpayers between $7 billion and $10 billion more by 2025. Because the state provides matching funds for pollution abatement on a sliding scale, Northern Virginia taxpayers will have to pick up two-thirds of the tab.
The report includes a graph by the Washington-based World Resources Institute, a radical environmental group that is still aggressively pursuing the discredited global warming agenda.
The WRI suggests various ways to “bend the cost-curve,” including a cap-and-trade initiative that would take thousands of acres of agricultural land in the Chesapeake Bay watershed out of food production (which will increase the cost of groceries) to create pollution “credits” that can then be sold to local governments.
The pollution diet will affect every state highway, city street, rural farm, urban enclave and suburban development. It will dramatically increase the cost of every private or public construction project.
And even though EPA has the legal authority to impose sanctions on jurisdictions that fail to reduce runoff sufficiently, “we could spend $15 billion, and if Pennsylvania is not successful, we could still have problems with the Bay,” admits legislative analyst Clyde Cristman.
No matter, because the pollution diet is merely the means to the real goal. As Examiner columnist Ron Arnold reported this summer, Obama has packed the federal government with “dam-killing, water-grabbing, natural gas enemies” and other job-killing environmental ideologues for a reason.
“The great majority of non-point sources (i.e. pollution sources that do not meet the Clean Water Act’s legal definition) in the Chesapeake Bay watershed will need to be controlled, and controlled well, in order to restore the Bay,” Obama said in his executive order.
Control of all human activity under the guise of environmental protection has long been the ultimate goal of Obama’s Big Green supporters. It’s on its way, and once again, taxpayers are the Big Losers.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
