Alex DeMetrick reports right now, 10 counties and the city of Baltimore are under orders to raise fees to clean stormwater runoff.
It’s not really a tax on rain. it’s a fee to reduce the pollutants that wash off hard surfaces during a rain and flow as stormwater runoff into waterways that feed the bay.
“When you have just one inch of rain on a hard surface, 27,000 gallons of polluted runoff flood our local streams,” said Will Baker, Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
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14 comments:
is there any possible way to put these people in the loony bin? they are absolutely clueless, dense, easily led and non-thinking. why would anyone listen to them? put them away asap...
So, what does this machine look like? How many will be needed? How much do they cost to build, and then to run each year? How does it work? What makes it better than a bed sheet? How much will the tax be to cover these costs each year?
They cannot answer ONE of these questions, yet they expect us to pay them!
LOL!
Why are there "Tax Ditches"? Don't we pay for this stormwater management tool every day? So, where are you spending this money we give you instead of the Tax Ditches? They are not working, I'm guessing? Did you make them wrong? Why do we need to pay this tax all over again?
Just give us money and we will magically clean up the Bay!
LOL!
Pretty simple situation here. You have good science backing bad public policy. Most of you here don't even understand what you are criticizing. With that said, policy makers came up with yet another half-baked idea, based off of science that they probably don't fully understand, in order to placate a special interest group.
Take away the Government TAKE HOME CARS
7 p.m, can you explain more about the good science. I want to understand this. Thanks.
Yes, 7 PM, pray, tell! We await the genius behind this tax... oh, I mean fee!
5:45 PM & 6:06
7:44 - he can't - he's FOS!
Yeh it called a sewer system.....8:13.. and if you have a brain you understand they are anti-tax..not sure were you stand?? I pray for no rain to screw up there drooling on the new revenue stream..kinda like to cig and booze tax....lost money on that projection tooo...but budget went forward regardless of the shortfalls...idiot fools moron the lot of em
9:11, even the idiots among us know that sewer and stormwater drainage is two different pipes! Obviously, you are not up to that qualification.
9:11,You need to slow down on the sauce. nothing you said made any sense, see you in the morning.
744, I will try but I doubt it will make much difference to clowns like you 813 and 826.
We have volumes of data on 1)precipitation 2)runoff rates based on topography and soil types 3) measurements from across the bay on numerous water quality metrics. By the way, much of this data is public and readily available, especially through the different NOAA and USGS websites. Taken together, you can utilize predictive models to estimate the amount of pollutants, especially nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) that are likely to runoff into the bay based on the amount of rain and the type of land cover (forest vs farms vs parking lots). Because we have such a large network of sensors, those models are then groundtruthed against real measurements. We know that an abundance of "impervious surface" (again parking lots, streets, sidewalks) is associated with higher amounts of runoff because development totally changes the flow of water into nearby streams/rivers that run into the bay. Here's a fun fact; that high amount of impervious surface is also related to lower abundances of fish babies (eggs and larvae) which impacts the abundance of the dinner plate size fish impacted rivers. The idea behind the tax was to promote mitigation efforts (rain gardens, semi-pervious parking lots, etc.). I for one think the policy was a bad way of attempting to go about this goal. But the science is pretty solid on this one. As with most political debates, common sense gets drowned out by those who scream the loudest and have the deepest pockets on either side of the issue.
6:22 They don't want to "clean up the bay", same as doctors don't want a "cure for cancer". If the bay was clean, they'd lose grants, federal and state funds, jobs, etc. They want it dirty, so they get even more money to line their pockets... while making you just a little more poor.
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