The Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund created to remove nitrogen by upgrading sewage treatment plants could run out of money in three years, a state water official told lawmakers Thursday.
A $1 dollar increase in the $2.50-a-month flush tax that supports the fund is one of the options to fix the potential deficit.
But House Environmental Matters Committee Chair Maggie McIntosh said the state will not “entertain an increase in the flush fee in this term.”
McIntosh emphasized, “There’s no formal proposal. They’re looking at all alternatives.”
Robert Summers, deputy secretary of the Department of the Environment, said $115 million already has been spent to upgrade sewage treatment plants. However, work won’t start for at least a year on the three largest plants that produce 63 percent of the nitrogen that flows into the Bay from Maryland, Summers said.
Those are Back River and Patapsco plants run by Baltimore City serving the city and three neighboring counties, and the White Plains plant in D.C. that serves suburban Maryland.
“We think we really need to maintain focus on the three largest plants,” Summers said. “To get the nitrogen out, we really need these upgrades.”
Nitrogen is the principal cause of the dead zones and loss of underwater grasses harming aquatic life in the Bay.
At the current rate of $30 a year for all property owners, including those with septic systems, the Bay Restoration Fund, sponsored by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, will run a deficit beginning in fiscal 2012 and grow to $245 million in the hole by 2018.
“We think an additional dollar a month would get us where we need to be,” Summers said. But other alternatives include having local governments pick up more of the costs, changing priorities for the plants being upgraded and issuing state bonds to fund the upgrades.
Another option is asking the federal government to pick up the $953 million costs of the Blue Plains upgrade, something long favored by Maryland officials. “That would take care of our deficit,” Summers said.
McIntosh pointed that these sewage upgrades were among the “shovel-ready projects” that Gov. Martin O’Malley put on his list sent to the new Obama administration to be funded by the stimulus package.
The restoration fund can also be used to make grants to upgrade the 420,000 septic systems in Maryland, but Summers said only 453 upgrades have been funded so far. McIntosh said the state needed to be more aggressive in helping residents upgrade their septic systems.
