Barely a month after several Eastern Shore counties challenged Maryland and Constellation Energy’s $340 million deal to relicense the Conowingo Dam, three out of four objecting jurisdictions have backed out of the appeal. Dorchester County voted last week to withdraw its challenge to a state environmental certification for the dam, while the attorney leading the coalition spearheading the challenge said two other counties, Queen Anne’s and Kent, also backed out. That leaves only Cecil County, the northern Maryland county at the mouth of the Susquehanna River and Conowingo Dam, holding the line.
Asked about the withdrawals, Charles D. “Chip” MacLeod, the attorney for the Clean Chesapeake Coalition that filed the appeal, pointed to a campaign by Maryland environmental officials to dissuade counties from their challenge. “Lots of pressure being applied to local officials who dared to slow the process and bring attention to a bad deal for the Bay and Marylanders,” MacLeod said in an email Friday. Cecil County officials remain committed to the challenge “at this stage,” MacLeod said.
Maryland Department of the Environment officials have toured the Eastern Shore in recent weeks in an effort to convince the Republican-led four counties to reconsider. State officials met with county leaders at a recent Maryland Association of Counties summit and have presented at county council meetings in both Cecil and Dorchester counties to make their case for the downstream benefits of the settlement deal. The effort appears to have paid off. Officials on the Dorchester County Council announced last week that they voted to withdraw from the appeal following conversations with state regulators.
A not so brief recap of the situation. When completed in 1928 on the Susquehanna River just above the head of Chesapeake Bay, Conowingo Dam was the second largest hydroelectric powerplant in the US. Immediately, sediments, natural erosion as well as agriculture enhanced silt, started to fill the "pool" behind the damn, protecting the Bay from them. When I arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region in 1985, the head of the EPA Bay Program said the filling of the pool with sediment was the single greatest threat to the Bay. Years later, that threat has become reality. The pool behind the damn has no room for more sediment, and in freshets, mud simple pours over the dam. Rather than plan ahead, the authorities decided to wait, and then blame whoever owned the dam at the time for the situation reverting back how it would be in the dams absence, tying restoring the pool (at least somewhat) to relicensing the dam. If it were me, I might just offer to hand them the keys for a buck or two, and find out how they deal with it.
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