Gunpowder Riverkeeper said it intends to sue a developer over alleged discharges of sediment into the Gunpowder River from a home construction site in Harford County.
The pollution incidents, involving runoff from the construction site into the Gunpowder River’s Foster Branch, began in May 2022 and occurred repeatedly through this summer, according to the nonprofit riverkeeper group’s notice of intent to sue, sent earlier this week.
The development, called Ridgely’s Reserve, is located along Magnolia Road near Pulaski Highway in Joppatowne, in an area that used to contain about 176 acres of forest, according to the notice. Under the federal Clean Water Act, which allows citizens to sue over pollution, parties must begin with a 60-day notice.
Harford County officials have fined the developer, Forestar Inc., $20,000 due to repeated sediment control violations on the site, according to Matt Button, a county spokesperson. The county has issued seven “stop work” orders to Forestar of varying lengths for fixes to be installed, Button said in an email. The most recent was a five-day stoppage in June, according to Button.
At a January hearing, the county considered an additional fine for Forestar or the suspension or revocation of its permits. Instead, the developer was required to submit a proposal for enhanced control measures. The county entered into an agreement with Forestar on those measures in February, requiring the developer to hire a dedicated contractor for sediment control and make other changes, according to Button.
The county will “continue to proactively inspect the project weekly and after major storms and will continue to hold the developer to the terms of the agreement, the permit and the sediment control plans,” Button wrote.
The Maryland Department of the Environment also has inspected the site repeatedly since 2022, often noting violations in its online reports. MDE and Harford County have documented at least 86 failed inspections, according to a news release from the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, which is representing Gunpowder Riverkeeper. The violations include repeated failure to maintain functional erosion controls, such as silt fences and stormwater basins.
Patrick DeArmey, a senior attorney with the alliance, said in the release that the violations are “one of the most egregious examples of uncontrolled construction stormwater runoff in Maryland,” adding that “the flows of turbid runoff are so large you can see it from space.”
Neither Forestar, nor its majority owner, D.R. Horton — the nation’s “largest homebuilder by volume” since 2002, according to its website — responded to a request for comment Friday from The Baltimore Sun. A Pennsylvania-based construction company listed on the legal filing, Kinsley Construction, also did not reply to a request for comment.
Gunpowder Riverkeeper Theaux Le Gardeur said he first saw the pollution while out on the river on his skiff a few years ago. The brown mud in the water stood in stark contrast to the river’s normal greenish hue, Le Gardeur said.
“We saw a mud line that was clear as day,” he said. “And we followed that all the way up to Foster Branch.”
The riverkeeper flagged the incident in a complaint to MDE, Le Gardeur said.
Since then, Le Gardeur said that water monitoring has captured continued cloudiness in that branch of the Gunpowder, which can block necessary sunlight from reaching underwater grasses, a critical habitat for blue crabs, fish and other aquatic life.
“In my 14 years as the Gunpowder Riverkeeper, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
A recent report from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science indicated that the acreage of all-important underwater grasses increased 7% from 2022 to 2023 in the Chesapeake, but documented unexplained declines in a few upper bay tributaries — including the Gunpowder. Researchers said turbidity, or cloudiness, in the water was likely to blame.
“That’s a really compelling report,” Le Gardeur said. “It is in lockstep with our findings related to folks mentioning that they could no longer crab effectively in the river. We’ve had folks that have had mud lines on their boats, if you will, for 2 1/2 years.”
In June, the Harford County Council passed a bill reestablishing a requirement that any future developments proceed in 20-acre increments. County Councilman Dion Guthrie, a Joppatowne Democrat, cited the 388-home Ridgely’s Reserve development and its sediment woes as the inspiration behind the legislation. But the bill does not apply to developments already underway.
The fines and agreement from the county haven’t ended the pollution, prompting the notice of intent to file suit, Le Gardeur said.
“MDE and the county have failed to send the message to those developers that they should be held accountable for pollution impacts, and they should be preventing that from happening,” Le Gardeur said.
MDE spokesman Dave Abrams shared its inspection reports, and declined to comment further on the case.
Bill Temmink, who has lived in the Joppatowne area for nearly 20 years and frequently walks in Mariner Point Park, near the Foster Branch, said he began noticing large orange plumes of mud about four years ago, after construction began on a sewer line leading to the project. The plumes appear after rain events, Temmink said.
“The problem isn’t the orange plumes so much as the fact that the river stays brown for a long time after that orange comes in,” he said. “You just can’t see the bottom if you’re more than 4 inches deep, and so no grasses grow.”
Temmink said he’s concerned that neither the state nor the county has done enough to halt the pollution events, even as they continue to impair the river in his backyard. With dozens of homes planned at prices starting around $400,000, a $20,000 fine doesn’t seem steep enough, Temmink said.
But Temmink found news that the riverkeeper had filed a notice of intent to sue encouraging.
“Everybody else has promised to do something. And the riverkeeper finally did it,” he said.
