Introduction:
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
The letter which appears below was run in the Cumberland Times-News on Wednesday, March 7, under a different title. Working under a word limit of 600 or so does perhaps boil down complex issues too much, so please bear that in mind. For more details about the existing reality and my thoughts on altering it - please see my formal testimony here www.dailykos.com/…
I have to laugh about the reaction to the 3,000 word plus testimony: I got a greater one from Maryland legislators I usually don’t hear from than from readers at the Daily Kos.
The bill is under further negotiations as I write and I hope something meaningful survives. But I think, in the long run, we will need to include Allegany and Garrett Counties under its provisions, and make the protection of forests, more carefully defined and mapped, a matter of state regulatory certainty, not developer whim and local official approval, and embark on a major, scientifically guided planting program with a new Civilian Conservation Corps at its heart.
I’ll leave you with a quote from some of my earlier background reading, from Maryland’s Strategic Forest Lands Assessment, done by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in October of 2003. During the two legislative hearings I listened too, about ten hours worth from February 20th and 21st in Annapolis, what struck me was the plea of urban legislators from Baltimore that the city didn’t have the money or staff to care for the trees they had now, much less the ones that they would like to plant, these huge gaps in coverage I found in the strategic assessment:
A 2001 study of roadside trees in the Baltimore-Washington corridor found that more than 390,00 trees line roadsides there, and that they are in good condition. Unfortunately, it also found that only about 14% of the sites appropriate for trees had trees on them, suggesting much more needs to be done to promote and protect a sustainable urban forest.
And now for the Letter-to-the-Editor to the largest Western Maryland regional paper:
Maryland Forests at Risk
I’m writing to my fellow citizens of Western Maryland about revisions to the Forest Conservation Act, HB-766 and SB-610, in Annapolis. It was originally passed in 1991.
Respected conservation organizations in our state have compiled evidence that the bill is not protecting our forests as intended. They say we are losing thousands of acres per year, and not replanting nearly enough trees to make up for the losses. And the state has admitted it has taken no enforcement actions other than polite meetings.
Now the bill in its original form, and by the current amendments, is not regulatory in nature. It is a process of justifications and documentation that specifies the steps that must be undertaken before forests are destroyed for development. Then the bill spells out, depending on where the forests are and the character of the development property, what the replacement ratio is for the forests/trees lost, ranging from 1:4 to 1:1 and in a few cases, 2:1.
Scientifically, these ratios are too low and cannot possibly compensate for the complexity of lost forest values. But that’s where the compromises stand today: hardly onerous provisions.
Maryland at its founding was covered 90 percent with forests; today it is around 41%, although the Department of Natural Resources claims we’re up to 51% forest cover. Or is that canopy cover, which is hardly the same thing? They say we’re doing a great job, what’s the worry? I hear that tone far too often about ecological matters in our state. My eyes and my reading tell me the story is not so uplifting.
I have two main worries. We in Allegany and Garrett Counties are not covered by the bill, the only two counties in the state, because, as originally written, it excluded counties with over 200,000 acres of forest. That’s a shame, because if I’ve learned anything by my four years in Frostburg, it is that citizens here love their forested mountain landscapes. Yet those landscapes are not protected from development impacts, and in fact, there is an air of resignation if not an outright welcome announced, an invitation to lose more forests, in the Allegany County Master Plan which states: “Due to the limited amount of developable land the historical trend of converting these lands to residential, commercial or industrial uses will likely continue into the future.”
Really? Do we have to lose more of the forests that clean our air, water and keep our temperatures from rising, when we have so many impaired former coal mining sites? And when we have so many “unemployed” properties in the downtowns of Cumberland and Frostburg, some right on the Main Streets, which need redevelopment?
And who remembers the warning issued by the Maryland Department of Planning report in 2004, which reminded us that “although extensive amounts of land are being preserved, much of it ultimately will be bordered or surrounded by residential subdivisions, at densities incompatible with state and local conservation goals.”
So I call upon our Western Maryland delegation – that’s Senator George C. Edwards, Jason Buckel, Wendell R. Beitzel and Mike McKay - to do two things: this year, support this ecologically improved legislation for the good of all of Maryland; and then think about bringing our two Western Counties into the conservation family, if not this time, then very soon in the future.
Indeed, if you were to offer our inclusion this year, I strongly suspect that your fellow legislators would gratefully welcome us back into the fold.
Sincerely,
billofrights