MD Supreme Court Makes Chicken Shit Decision

From the Balmer Sun, Maryland Supreme Court says ammonia rules for chicken farms are sufficient. Environmental groups disagree.

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Maryland is doing enough to regulate gaseous ammonia emitted by the state’s poultry houses, overturning a lower court ruling.

The 6-1 decision reversed a 2021 ruling from the Montgomery County Circuit Court that would have required the Maryland Department of the Environment to regulate the smelly, harmful gas under a water pollution permit issued to chicken farms and other animal feeding operations, since the gas can pollute state waterways. The majority of the state Supreme Court justices felt that Maryland’s original water pollution permit, issued in 2019 under Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, was sufficient, since it called on animal feeding operations to adopt “best management practices” to curtail ammonia pollution.

The case began in 2020, when the Assateague Coastal Trust, an environmental group, challenged the Maryland permit. The Trust also had challenged previous iterations of the permit for chicken farms, to no avail. In the 2020 case, the group found success as the Montgomery County court agreed that Maryland would have to reconsider the permit and add restrictions on the amount of ammonia released.

But MDE appealed in 2021, and the state Supreme Court sided with the agency. “The Legislature has given broad discretion to the Department to establish permit terms and conditions as the Department determines are necessary,” the decision released Wednesday said. “The text of the statute does not instruct the Department as to how it must make these determinations or the water quality controls that must be included.”

In a statement Wednesday, Maryland Environment Secretary Serena McIlwain, who serves under Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, called the court’s decision “a win for the Chesapeake Bay.”
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The Delmarva Chicken Association, which represents poultry farmers in the region and has supported the agency’s original permit in court, also cheered Wednesday’s decision. “We’re glad the Maryland Supreme Court recognized this challenge to the 2019 permit lacked merit and mischaracterized the law‚” Holly Porter, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “This is the third consecutive time these activists have tried and failed to persuade courts to overrule science-based, legally sound water quality regulations.”
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But environmental advocates, who have long pushed for tighter controls on the chicken houses that dot the Eastern Shore, argued the ruling deals a blow to the state’s effort to clean up the Chesapeake. “We have a substantial source of unregulated pollution and the agency has chosen to do nothing about it,” said Brenda Davis, the Coastal Trust’s executive director, in a statement Wednesday. Part of why environmental groups have sought regulation under the Clean Water permit process is because Maryland animal feeding operations, as a category, aren’t required to get Clean Air Act permits.