A new trash wheel for Back River: Baltimore funds projects after wastewater woes
Maryland Secretary of the Environment Serena McIlwain speaks at a news conference in Essex about environmental projects that will be funded as compensation for pollution from the city's two wastewater treatment plants. The Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant is seen in the background. (Photo by Christine Condon/ Maryland Matters)
The Baltimore region could get a new trash wheel, one of 21 environmental projects for which Baltimore City is providing funding to compensate for pollution caused by the failure of two city wastewater treatment plants during the pandemic.
The projects, announced Tuesday, will be funded by $1.7 million from the city under a consent decree with the Maryland Department of the Environment. The decree also required millions of dollars in repairs and other improvements to the treatment plants, $1.4 million in penalties and the potential for another $1.4 million of improvement efforts fall short.
The Chesapeake Bay Trust will distribute funding for the projects, which include tree plantings, rain gardens, waterway sampling, trail stabilization and educational efforts around the Baltimore region.
'These projects, they're going to provide real benefits to those communities that have really faced pollution for way too long,' said Maryland Environment Secretary Serena McIlwain during an event Tuesday at Cox's Point Park, across from the Back River plant. 'But they're not just going to address the damages of the past. They're actually going to create new opportunities for those communities.'
Baltimore City's two wastewater treatment plants — the Back River plant in Dundalk and one on the Patapsco River in Wagner's Point — are the largest in Maryland. And as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, they descended into disrepair.
Advocates at the nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore first flagged high bacteria levels in the Patapsco in 2021, tipping off state environmental inspectors who uncovered mechanical failures and staffing woes that led to overages of pollutants such as bacteria and nutrients, which cause algae blooms that harm marine life.
Months later, with the Back River plant — the larger of the two — on the verge of 'catastrophic failure,' then-Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles invoked a rarely used provision in state law to send a team of Maryland Environmental Service experts in to oversee operations at the plant. MDE then filed suit against the city, as did Blue Water Baltimore.
By about June 2022, Back River plant discharges began to meet pollution limits, and the Patapsco plant followed behind. The city paid MES some $7 million for its assistance.
'These plants, as we all know, have faced some real challenges over the past years,' McIlwain said. 'But how you respond to those challenges is really what matters. And I am so happy to say today that the city of Baltimore responded. The Maryland Environmental Service responded.'
While the consent decree included the threat of another $1.4 million in penalties if the city failed to comply, the city is 'on track' not to owe the extra funds, MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said in a statement Tuesday.
As of its most recent report, in February, the city has spent $167 million on repairs at Back River and another $92 million at Patapsco. The city has also disbursed some $40 million to hire private contractors to augment city staff at the facilities.
The plants are generally compliant with their daily, weekly and monthly pollution discharge limits, but exceedances and spills have led to about $72,000 in additional fines against the city since the consent decree took effect.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who turned 41 last week, said Tuesday that the two sewage plants 'haven't had the investment that they needed in my lifetime.' The Back River plant opened in 1911 and the Patapsco plant in 1940.
'We know where we were just a few short years ago, and you can see that we've taken leaps and bounds since then,' Scott said. 'But this is not us celebrating. This is us acknowledging the great progress that's been made, and also acknowledging that we have a lot more work to do.'
Community groups who remember when overages at the Back River plant closed the river to swimming just a few years ago remain wary, especially when odors waft around Dundalk and Essex. But Tuesday was still an exciting day, said Desiree Greaver, a project manager at the nonprofit Back River Restoration Committee, which will install the new trash wheel.
'It's like Christmas,' Greaver said. 'This is huge for Back River. It's going to be so impactful, and the community is really excited.'
Just about every day, the committee sends volunteers to a trash-collecting boom just upstream of the wastewater treatment plant, who don waders and manually remove trash and debris. Once, they caught a hot tub. Another time, port-a-potties.
Even with $655,363 coming from Tuesday's consent decree, the committee still needs to raise several hundred thousand dollars to make the project a reality, Greaver said. But the nonprofit is optimistic that the project will come to fruition, possibly within 18 months. And once it does, it will make life a lot easier for trash-cleaning volunteers.
'We actually have people getting in the water, physically removing the trash, and we can't rely on that forever,' Greaver said. 'It's not a glamorous job. It's not something that's easy to find help for. So we were really looking forward to something that was automated.'
The new trash wheel will join four others along Baltimore shorelines, best known for their large googly eyes and varying personas.
About $44,000 of the grant money will also go toward a mentoring program administered by One More … One Less, focused on connecting individuals with mental health challenges to water recreation, said Brian Bordley, the group's CEO.
During Tuesday's event, Bordley spoke about his own memories fishing with his father near Cox's Point Park, gaining valuable life experience — even when they didn't catch anything. By starting his own mentoring program, he hoped to share those same experiences with local kids.
'We gave access to these kids to be on the water, and we saw things change in their behavior,' Bordley said. 'Their attitudes became adjusted. Their behavior started to become less hostile and angry. We found that they had a mental health byproduct of just being out on the water.'
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