BIRD BRAINS

"...you were not born to live like the beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge." –Dante

The following letter was sent to the Maryland Coast Dispatch:

Editor:

Humans supposedly have the capacity to avoid danger by using the thinking power of our large frontal lobes, but the recent discussion about expanding the Ocean City airport has me wondering if perhaps we often resemble lemmings in our blind insistence on continuing along well-worn paths to destruction.

The airport (known by the Feds as OXB) sits smack in the middle of the Atlantic Migratory Flyway. Collisions between birds and airplanes are a documented danger, causing millions of dollars of property damage and the loss of human life.

In 2000, an extensive study of the wildlife in the vicinity of the airport was done as part of a requirement for the possibility of creating wetlands there as mitigation for permits. In one month alone, more than 1,000 birds of 25 species used the airspace at OXB. That study concluded that attracting additional wildlife to the airport was "contradictory to safe aviation at OXB."

Since we can’t expect the birds to give up their ancient migratory route, we humans have to make the choice. Do we increase the risk by expanding the airport, or do we err on the side of caution by keeping things as they are?

If the wrong choice is made and a plane goes down, I pity the persons who have to live with that blood on their hands.

The study mentioned in the letter above is the "Wildlife Hazard Management Report for Ocean City Municipal Airport" written primarily by R. Scott Healey, Staff Wildlife Biologist for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The first paragraph of the report's introduction is worth quoting.

"Wildlife at airports has become a major concern due to the potential for impacts on human health and safety, as well as the cost of damages to airplanes and the aviation industry (Thorpe 1997, Conover et al. 1995). Throughout aviation history, wildlife-aircraft collisions have resulted in the loss of not only air time and money, but human lives (Dolbeer et al. 2000, Conover et al. 1995). In the last decade alone, the civil aviation industry alone lost over $300 million per year as a result of wildlife strikes (Cleary and Dolbert 1999). Wildlife-aircraft damage is in itself substantial enough to deserve proactive measures in attempts to prevent strikes. With over 80% of wildlife strikes taking place in the airport environment, where better than at the airport to beigin taking corrective and preventive measures to stop wildlife-aircraft strikes. [sic]"

The report goes on to document the many kinds of mammals and birds that pose dangers at the airport. Trust me, it is not something you want to read while waiting to board your flight. But it must be noted that the current airport management has done an effective job of reducing the risks from wildlife. Plus, private pilots know the dangers. Expansion and commercial flying by the public is a different story.

Unfortunately, I cannot find the report online, but I will make a copy available for the County Commissioners if they wish. They seem to be on the right side of this issue.

Of course human safety alone is not the only reason to oppose expansion of the airport. The forested wetland impacts west of Rt. 611 are huge, many times more than all the wetland impacts in the entire State in any year. And these are not just your average wetlands; these are valuable forested wetlands, part of a large forest in a sensitive Coastal Bays watershed. Plainly speaking, this would be an airport built in a swamp. (How about Soggy Bottom Airways? Slogan: You are now free to slosh about the country.)

As a wetland consultant, I think the whole effort to expand the airport is a waste of time and money, because I think that permits to impact these wetlands will never be granted. Wetland permits require that the property owner clearly demonstrates that the economic and/or public need for the project outweighs the value of the lost natural resource. And that's going to be mighty tough to prove here.

So forget it folks; we must remain vigilant, but it ain't gonna happen.

A BOATLOAD OF JERKS

To all those who have posted comments calling me one of many colorful varieties of jerk, I offer this: What else is new?

The idea that we are all jerks is the entire basis of our government, as I read the Founders. If we were not all jerks in some way, we wouldn’t need the Constitution to protect ourselves from one another.

Spaceship Earth, some say, but I see it more as a boat, a lifeboat, hurtling through the cosmic ocean and crammed with jerks.

But just as the photos from space show our cities lit up at night, sometimes we can see a jerk who rises momentarily to give off a brilliant sparkle of light that guides us through the unknown.

So please, try to stick to the issues. We’re all in the same boat. All comments will be read, but personal ones will not get past the filter. It’s my blog and them’s the rules. And as much as I appreciate the many messages of encouragement and praise, I must delete them also.

MY APOLOGY

I heard from a fellow who was quite upset about my use of the term "chemo-lawn" in my letter to the newspaper about the buffers on the Riddle farm (reproduced in the previous post "Naive No More"). Evidently he’s in the lawn business, and as best I could understand, he thought I implied that there was something wrong with chemo-lawns. He demanded a public apology. So here goes:

I apologize. I promise never to write chemo-lawn again. I will not write it in capitals, like this: CHEMO-LAWN, nor in italics: chemo-lawn, nor in bold: chemo-lawn. I will try to not even think chemo-lawn, and I’ll tell everyone I know to forget the term chemo-lawn. Y'all got that? Forget CHEMO-LAWN.

But there’s a problem. I was only using a quicky term instead of "lawns consisting exclusively of turf grasses that are nourished by chemical fertilizers and cleared of insects and other living things by means of herbicide/pesticide application." I don’t want to type that all the time, so what to do?

How about (blank)-lawn? I could say: "Only a (blank) would live in a house surrounded by a (blank)-lawn." Does this work? After all, (blank) can mean anything, right?

I think I’ll go with this. So to my pal in the lawn biz, let me say that continued exposure to your (blank)-lawns could turn you into a (blankety-blank) and may even make your (blank) shrivel up and drop off.

NAIVE NO MORE

For those that missed it, the following letter appeared in the Maryland Coast Dispatch on Friday, October 13. I seem to have caused a stir.

Editor:
As a consultant for nearly 20 years helping guide local developers and property owners through the thicket of environmental regulations, I thought I had seen most of the follies of politicians, but recent revelations about the County’s Critical Area Law and the Riddle farm have left me shaking my head.

But before I reveal to the world just how naive I can be, a little background is in order.

When Centex began work in earnest along the waterfront of Herring and Turville Creeks, many of my clients and neighbors told me it appeared that the Riddle development didn’t seem to be following the same rules as everyone else. Trees were being cleared very close to the water, and nearby property owners were upset, especially those who were impacted by the Critical Area law. I remember one angry lot owner who was forced to go to the Board of Zoning Appeals to request a variance from Critical Area Law to build a fence to keep his toddlers from falling into the canal. Many others had to pay thousands of dollars in buffer fees, for no real benefit to the environment that I could see.
I had not paid much attention to the portion of the law that affected the Riddle farm, but my clients began raising questions that I didn’t know how to answer.

About this time, Jay Charland, the former Coastkeeper of the Assateague Coastal Trust (ACT), began looking into what he called environmental "irregularities" on the Riddle farm, and he asked for my help understanding some of the more complicated regulations.

Commissioner Bud Church was being asked some of these same questions by his constituents along the creeks, and he also asked me to help him understand what was going on.

Reading the portion of the law that exempted the Riddle farm from many of the Critical Area regulations, I noted that the development was not exempted from the requirement for buffers from tidal wetlands and waters. The law states that "85% of the dwelling units must comply with the 100' buffer." But then someone pointed out that the word waterfront was not included. Bingo! Was the omission of waterfront just an oversight, or did somebody pull a fast one?

Surely this must have been an oversight, I reasoned, since applying the 100' buffer to 85% of the more than 500 lots in the development would allow many of the waterfront lots to not have this buffer. Also, it was clearly absurd to apply such buffers to lots in the middle of the development. Or so I thought.

Bud Church and Joe Fehrer, Act’s President, were also curious. I wrote a letter on their behalf to the five County Commissioners who signed the law in 2002 asking what their intentions were. Did they intend the buffers to apply to waterfront lots or not?

Of the five, two responded immediately. To their credit, both Sonny Bloxom and Louise Gulyas called and said of course they meant waterfront lots, and they both expressed surprise that this was not how the law was being interpreted. The other three Commissioners, Jeanne Lynch, Virgil Shockley, and James Purnell, did not respond.

Bud Church worked hard to set up a meeting with County staff so that he and ACT could know how the law was being applied. Lo and behold, the County attorney said the staff had no choice but to interpret the law exactly as it was written and that the 100' buffer did not apply to many of the waterfront lots.

Jeanne Lynch attended the meeting. When asked what her intentions were at the time, first she said she couldn’t remember; then she said it was "time to move on," and later she admitted that "maybe" she was snookered. As I recall, Mrs. Lynch was a prime architect and booster of this law.

We also discovered that even on the lots planned with buffers, clearing of trees within the buffer was allowed to take place before a home was built.
Of course Centex was not the only national developer exempted from portions of the law. Several other projects by large corporations were also exempted, some completely, although it must be said that they were either re-developments of existing projects or took place on disturbed sites. They were not projects impacting a pristine area like the Riddle farm.

And what is the practical effect of this wording? Well, on a high tide I paddled my kayak right up to a silt fence on the Riddle farm. I took pictures. Behind the silt fence was fresh fill dirt, which will no doubt become a typical Centex chemo-lawn when a house is built. Stuff applied to that lawn will end up in the bay.

So that’s the sad story, and the bottom line is this: Owners of single recorded lots, those we in the consultant trade call "mom and pop," are bearing the brunt of the Critical Area law while the big outside corporations get a pass. The little guy and the environment took a hit.

What can be done? Three things.

First, those property owners who feel they have been unfairly impacted by the Critical Area law should fight for their rights. Take your case to the Board of Zoning Appeals. Show how your family is not hurting the environment by building an addition or a fence. And when you are asked if you are being unfairly restricted from doing something others are allowed to do, just point out the exemptions in the law for the big money boys. Do not be afraid; the members of the Board are your fellow citizens.

Second, Centex should be asked by the current commissioners to plant some additional native vegetation between manicured lawns and the creeks. Now that Centex is established in our community, they seem to be trying to improve their image and be better neighbors.

And third, beware those who use the environment as a political weapon to advance themselves or their allies. They are often hypocrites and usually misinformed. When you hear them talk, don’t be as naive as I was. Hold your nose and hang on to your wallet.

PLANT TREES, GET DUMB

I've been misquoted by newspapers before, but never with such mind-bending effect as in last week's Worcester County Times in a story about a public meeting to address flooding problems in Berlin.

As the meeting centered around ways that individual home owners could help alleviate the flooding in their yards, I made the offhand comment that one oak tree pulls some 1,000 gallons of water a day out of the ground and that planting trees could help slow down water flows. Plus, I said, "The more you plant the less you mow."

But the newspaper has me saying: "The more you plant the less you know."

Gardeners, farmers and tree planters everywhere, beware! There is a new disease stalking the land--Planters' Dementia. Heck, I've planted so many trees it's a wonder I still know my own name.

My friends have been having fun with this--"Now we know why you're so dumb"--is typical, but after the laughter everyone wonders how this made it into the paper.

I called the editor, who was apologetic, but who I could tell also thought it rather funny. He offered to print a correction, but I declined. They'd probably get that wrong too, I said, and besides, nobody reads a story about flooding in Berlin anyway.

Later the writer called. She was embarrassed and apologetic. I was curious. How did this happen? Well, it turns out that she had "knows" instead of "mows" in her notes and she just wrote it that way.

The fact that it doesn't make much sense apparently never dawned on her.

Of course, my other comments about the flooding in Berlin never were mentioned, and that was the reason I had attended. I've been trying to tell whomever would listen that the main reason there is flooding in Henry's Mill and Henry's Green subdivisions is fairly simple--some of the homes were approved to be built in the flood plain. Am I the only one who gets this?

Build in flood plain, homes will flood. Duh. What part of this is difficult to understand?

In addition, most of these subdivisions are platted on hydric (wetland) soils, that is, soils with a high water table that is often right to the surface during the rainy season.

Wetland soils are wet land. Duh.

I also mentioned that the land that was rezoned for an industrial park contains wetland soils and a flood plain. Nobody commented. I guess town officials will just wait until after buildings go in and people complain about flooding. Then they'll scream bloody murder and order another expensive study by the Corps of Engineers.

By the way, when the current mayor was running for office on a platform of fixing flooding problems, I had been working on a nearby project and had discovered the problems with the other subdivisions. I called him and explained the situation. I wasn't playing the blame game. I thought he'd be excited to know such problems could be avoided in the future. He listened but then said it didn't matter because he was friends with one of the developers and he didn't want to embarrass him.

Politics and the environment. So it goes.