© Marlene A. Condon
June, 2013
Earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled Board of Supervisors of Fairfax County, with the help of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, successfully fought the EPA’s attempt to regulate storm water flow into Accotink Creek.
The EPA was trying to keep the creek from being drowned in sediment from storm water runoff. The board was trying to keep from using taxpayer dollars to adequately fix this problem that was totally caused by inappropriate development.
The sediment from Fairfax County storm water runoff does not just impair Accotink Creek. It affects the Potomac River, which the creek enters, and the Chesapeake Bay, which the Potomac flows into.
Therefore the county of Fairfax and the state of Virginia effectively ignored a moral duty to preserve a natural resource that has been historically one of the most productive estuaries on the planet—an economically important source of food and recreation (fishing, birding, boating) for all Virginians.
In Charlottesville, the Rivanna River feeds the James River, which flows to the Chesapeake Bay. Because of the huge amount of impervious surface area that people maintain on most properties, rainwater runs over the ground instead of soaking into it as would happen in natural landscapes.
The rainwater picks up pollutants, such as oil and grease from machinery as well as pesticides and fertilizers from yards, and is carried by ditches, drains, and pipes straight into local streams and rivers without the benefit of water treatment.
Thus virtually all of the pollution created in Charlottesville and picked up by rainwater ends up ultimately in the Bay. The EPA has been trying for years to get governments and citizens in the Bay watershed to voluntarily take steps to limit adverse effects upon the Bay.
People create the situations that result in storm water runoff, so they need to take responsibility for fixing them (unlike Fairfax, that shirked its duty). In Charlottesville, officials are giving the impression that they are taking steps to address the deleterious effects of runoff on the Bay by instituting a fee system, which Albemarle County may soon emulate.
The city will charge citizens for the amount of impervious surface area (such as rooftops, driveways, parking lots) on every developed property other than those built and maintained by government. The fee—referred to as the “rainwater tax” by some folks—is part of the city’s Water Resources Protection Program (WRPP).
The point of the WRPP is “to address Charlottesville’s storm water related challenges in a comprehensive and economically and environmentally sustainable manner.” Unfortunately, the main point of the fee is simply to raise money to resize or rehabilitate existing pipes to remove storm water from impervious areas more quickly.
This means polluted water will be moved to the Bay more quickly, which means the fee simply enables people to continue to harm it. As too often happens, local government officials are not attacking the root cause of a problem, but instead taking the most expensive route to accommodate the problem.
As with the decision to spend a lot of money to build a new dam at Ragged Mountain instead of getting people to continue to reduce their water usage, local government officials have decided to spend a lot of money for construction work instead of getting people to change their landscaping to minimize storm water runoff.
People can’t get rid of rooftops or perhaps even parking lots, but they can replace most of their impervious landscaping. If the City took the intelligent route, they would discourage the societal push for artificial landscapes that are overly manicured and sterile, lacking the life forms necessary to keep them functioning as the natural world is meant to do.
Right now, non-environmentally friendly landscapes are enabled by laws and regulations that forbid (city “weed” ordinances, suburban covenants) or discourage (county land-use regs) the nature-friendly landscaping that would not only make land in the Bay watershed permeable, but also perfectly functional without the use of pesticides and excessive amounts of fertilizer.
Consider that lawn and turf grass is now considered the largest crop grown in the Chesapeake Bay watershed—“more than 3.8 million acres covering a staggering 9.5 percent of the watershed’s total land area. Turf cover now exceeds total pasture cover (7.7%), hay/alfalfa acres (7.4%) and the acreage of row crops (9.2%—corn, soybean, wheat) grown in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.” (chesapeakestormwater.net/2009/06/the-grass-crop-of-the-chesapeake-bay-watershed/)
Farmers are used to getting blamed for causing many of the problems affecting the Bay, but finally some scientists are recognizing that non-farmers (i.e., homeowners) are just as guilty by their cultivation of a turf “crop.” As reported in the same paper:
About 19 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients are used each year (mostly herbicides to kill otherwise fine-looking “weeds”). These pesticides are reaching local streams and rivers. According to USGS monitoring data, one or more pesticides were detected in 99% of urban streams, and one out of every five samples exceeded water quality standards to protect aquatic life.
Our compacted lawns produce extra runoff to the Bay. Thus, if we truly want to save the Chesapeake Bay, we can no longer ignore the elephant in the room. We must face the reality that every person who maintains more than a minimum amount of lawn for relaxing—especially one that is a thick carpet of grass grown as a monoculture—is contributing to the continued impairment of the Bay.
It’s unbelievable that some government agencies, universities, and lawn care companies claim that lawns are “green.” Here are just some of the reasons that a lawn can never be considered environmentally friendly:
A lawn consists of one or more nonnative (i.e. invasive) grasses. To maintain the green color of the grass, a lawn tends to be over-watered and over-fertilized (a source of nutrient runoff).
People are told that a lawn should not contain “weeds” or insects, thus they apply poisonous herbicides and insecticides.
Continual mowing throughout the growing season is a huge source of air and water pollution from engine exhaust.
The continual mowing, week after week, year after year, compacts the soil (especially if it has a high clay content), thus making a lawn a prime source of storm water runoff.
If lawns were permeable (as the city of Charlottesville apparently believes since it plans to only charge a fee on hardscaped surfaces), lawn care companies would not need to sell aeration and dethatching services in an attempt to make lawns permeable for the benefit of the grass roots.
However, the degree to which a lawn care company can even make a lawn temporarily permeable is minimal. Manmade aeration consists of making holes just a few inches deep (as opposed to the depth of wildlife-performed aeration), leaving the compacted soil below that depth to act as a barrier preventing further penetration of water. Thus a lawn does little to hold back storm water runoff.
At its web site, the city boasts that the Stormwater Utility Ordinance is truly a partnership between local government personnel and leaders/partners within the community. It then immediately names numerous conservation-related organizations that support its fee system. This is exactly what Charlottesville and Albemarle County officials did to “sell” the need for the new Ragged Mountain Dam to area taxpayers.
It’s truly puzzling that the city, in concert with all of these conservation-minded groups, could have totally overlooked lawns as a serious contributor to the storm water problems facing this area as well as the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also deeply disturbing.
Charlottesville Stormwater Utility Fee Won’t Help Save the Bay (Part One: The Problem)
The Solution—Changing Minds, Changing Lawns, and Changing Landscape
© Marlene A. Condon
July, 2013
To address the deleterious effects of local runoff on the Chesapeake Bay, Charlottesville has instituted a fee system, which Albemarle County may soon emulate.
The City will charge citizens for the amount of impervious surface area on their developed properties. “Impervious surface area” is defined as “any surface coverings that do not absorb water, including roads, roofs, and parking lots.”
In other words, Charlottesville officials are making people pay for the impact of structures they require. Although you can and should limit the size of your dwelling, you do need a place to live. That means you probably also need a “road” (driveway) or a parking lot (if you live in an apartment) to access your dwelling, so you are being asked to pay a fee on necessities.
Because there is not much an individual can do to avoid needing these particular impervious surfaces, it does seem a bit immoral to assess a fee on them as if anyone has much choice. (The same is true for food—commodities such as meat, dairy, vegetables, and fruits—should never be taxed.)
However, because lawns are optional and highly detrimental in many ways to our environment in addition to contributing to storm water runoff, there would be absolutely nothing unjust about assessing a fee on the amount of lawn area on a property.
There is now a legitimate and compelling reason for government to encourage, via the power of taxation, the creation of more natural, and thus more environmentally friendly, landscapes that would not only make land in the Bay watershed more permeable, but also perfectly functional without the use of pesticides and excessive amounts of fertilizer.
What government should be doing is allowing a minimum square footage of lawn around the house and charging a fee for the amount of lawn area beyond that amount. The reality is that most lawns see little, if any, use and the only reason that most people have lawns is simply because it’s the accepted form of landscaping in our society.
A lawn could—and should—be replaced by whatever combination of flowers, wild grasses, vines, shrubs, and trees a landowner enjoys seeing. The idea that a lawn with a few plants here and there will function without problems is an idea born of ignorance.
There absolutely must be a variety of plants to support a variety of organisms because the critters are the ones that keep the environment functioning properly. For example, the animal activity that takes place in a nature-friendly garden is responsible for helping it to retain even heavy rain.
A natural area with large numbers of plants of different heights comprises a vast multilayered canopy that must have all surfaces dampened before a drop of rain even reaches the soil.
When a droplet does hit the ground, the soil will accept it because of the innumerable kinds of invertebrates living within the soil, aerating it with their activities. Additionally, most mammals either dig for food, tunnel through the soil, or make their homes underground, allowing water to enter the earth through the holes that they make.
Yet the unnatural landscape dominated by lawn that supports very little wildlife is favored by development covenants and city and county officials even though it is doomed to being problem-prone from the get-go. People, including government officials, must change their minds about what our immediate environment should look like. Abolishing “weed” ordinances and instituting a lawn tax would definitely be a start in the right direction.
When I’ve spoken with government officials about why they seem obsessed with limiting the height of grass and other plants in yards, the word “vermin” always comes up. Again, this is a display of the ignorance in society about our natural world. The word “vermin” is typically used as an excuse for people to kill particular animals that they fear or view as competitors, such as foxes, coyotes, rats, mice, and even hawks.
Right here in Albemarle County in the 1980s, hawks were shot and killed illegally as “vermin” on billionaire John Kluge’s estate. Coyotes are being killed nowadays with the approval of the Game Department, even though they offer a better way to keep deer populations in check than waiting for disease to take its toll (the means of last resort for Mother Nature when other population-control methods have failed).
It’s time for people to accept the fact that the consequence of eliminating predators is dealing with overpopulations of their prey. While government officials worry that mice and rats will be a problem if they allow citizens to create meadows around their homes, these animals are legendary for their abundance in big cities where there are no meadows—and few, if any, predators.
In Albemarle County, many suburban neighborhoods are governed by covenants that severely restrict the kind of landscaping that is allowed. People who live in these areas are going to have to decide whether they want to rescind the covenants so people can landscape in a more intelligent manner and not pay a tax, or whether they want to keep covenants in place and pay for the “privilege” of harming the Chesapeake Bay.
In the rural areas of Albemarle, supervisors must make a case to our state legislators to change laws to allow supervisors to give tax breaks to everyone who creates a nature-friendly landscape. Right now, only owners of large properties get huge breaks on real estate taxes—even though they aren’t usually doing a thing to help the environment or the Bay to be healthy!
People who grow grapes (please note that wine is not a necessity) pollute the landscape with pesticides throughout the growing season.
People who raise horses (again, not a necessity) tend to maintain a landscape that is every bit as manicured as a suburban lawn—and every bit as detrimental to our environment.
Some people own large tracts of open area that, if they can line up a farmer to cut hay, will get a tax break even though it would be far better for that land to be maintained in a natural state for the benefit of our wildlife.
We are losing numerous species of birds and other critters that need fields in which to reproduce—not a cut field that is, for all intents and purposes, just another, albeit larger, lawn. These animals have value, providing services that keep the environment in and beyond the field functioning properly.
It makes sense to give farmers a break on land assessments because they are feeding the rest of us. (However, even they should maintain some habitat for wildlife. Unfortunately, now days even farmers do away with natural areas.)
But what is the justification for allowing a break to owners of large tracts of forest? What is a 20-acre forest doing that a one-acre forest isn’t?
In point of fact, the one-acre forest protected from yet further development within an otherwise environmentally degraded subdivision is going to do far more to help that environment to function better than twenty contiguous acres elsewhere.
These regulations are not only senseless, they are also grossly discriminatory to most of the citizens in the county who pay far more in taxes on small pieces of property than do those who own much larger parcels.
The sad truth is that people refuse to recognize the true cost to our environment of maintaining unnatural landscapes. And, while well-intentioned, taxpayer-subsidized rain barrels and rain gardens are not sufficient to solve our problems.
What we need is an extreme makeover of our developed landscape. Otherwise, there can be no saving of the Chesapeake Bay.
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