May 26, 2026
Baltimore County Council
400 Washington Ave
Towson, MD 21204
Re: Bill 37-26, 2026 Basic Services Sewerage Map (BSSM)
Dear Council Members:
The purpose of this letter is to express our deep disappointment with both the timing and the substance of the letter dated May 4, 2026 submitted to you by the Office of Governmental Affairs in opposition to an amendment proposed by Councilman Patoka expanding the Area of Deficiency (AOD) within the Jones Falls sewershed. As for the timing, it appears that a copy of the letter was not made available to the public in advance of the hearing on the amendment on May 4th.. Consequently, we were unable to respond to it before the council voted on it.
Had we been able to respond, we would have pointed out to you that the administration went to great lengths to give the right answer to the wrong question. Yes, the projected sewage yield from the specific types of uses within a proposed development project is governed by “formulaic standards.” No, that is not nor ever has been the issue.
As the Department of Public Works and Transportation (DPWT) well knows, the issue that has been raised for years by the Green Towson Alliance and others is that the methodology employed by the county to ensure that existing public sewer pipes within the sewershed are adequate to convey sewage from a proposed development to a treatment plan is flawed. Unacceptably, the details of that methodology have remained a mystery.
What we do know is that, in two of the three times the results of the methodology were tested against the testimony of experts in hearings before a county administrative law judge (ALJ), the conclusions reached by DPWT that downstream pipes were adequate were soundly rejected by the ALJs, as described in our written testimony on Bill 37-26. In the third case, Torch Hill, we believe that the ALJ would have reached a different result if DPWT had disclosed a report revealing significant deficiencies in downstream interceptor pipes.
The council has given itself oversight of the way the county determines the adequacy of certain public facilities to support existing and planned development through the requirement that it reviews and approves basic services maps for sewerage, water supply and transportation. We ask the council to exercise that oversight responsibility by demanding that DPWT fully disclose its methodology for assessing the adequacy of pipes to convey sewage without causing sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs). In other words, what are the components of the “hydraulic modeling and system monitoring” referred to in the body of the letter?
Until DPWT’s methodology is available for public review, there is no reason to assume that it won’t continue to produce flawed results, either because the methodology itself is flawed or because it is being misapplied. In effect, the council has delegated the task of protecting the environment and public health from a flawed methodology (and therefore from SSOs) to community associations wealthy enough to hire lawyers and expert witnesses.
We provided our data to you following the legislative session on May 4, 2026 as requested. The data alone raises enough questions that this council should demand to see details of the methodology DPWT is using to approve new development rather than accept the unsupported assertions in the May 4, 2026 Office of Governmental Affairs letter at face value.
Our skepticism about the methodology is based on long and unsatisfactory experience with DPWT. It should be noted that our skepticism was shared by John Beverungen, the ALJ who issued the 2019 decision halting the proposed Bluestem Village project based on his finding that “the sewer system serving the property is woefully inadequate to handle existing demand, much less additional inputs from recently approved development in the Towson area.”
Bluestem Village was Mr. Beverungen’s final decision before retiring after about 25 years with the county, the first fourteen as an assistant county attorney and the last nine as an ALJ. On page 25 of his decision he said, in so many words, that one of the reasons that he did not find the council’s approval of a BSSM dispositive of the issue of whether public sewerage in an area was adequate or deficient was that he wouldn’t put it past county officials to fudge the numbers on a BSSM if necessary to avoid a moratorium on development.
That’s a strong indictment of the reliability of DPWT’s work product from someone in a position to know. At the very least, it should inform the council that its role in overseeing this regulatory process must extend beyond accepting everything DPWT says at face value.
Finally, we want to emphasize that the moratorium on development referred to in the May 4th letter was never our goal. Our goal from the time we began looking into this matter ten years ago because of raw sewage overflows in Towson Run has not been to stop development, but to make sure that the county fulfilled its obligation to make sure that public sewerage was adequate to serve existing and planned development.
Indeed, we believe that the situation that exists today could have been avoided if previous administrations and councils had made better decisions, decisions based on realistic, long-range plans for financing and constructing improvements to the county’s public sewer system. Instead, we have studies, like the $2.3M Hazen Jones Falls Sewershed Comprehensive Evaluation that was due to be completed by December 2022 but is still missing in action. Kicking the problem down the road, as the county has done, has made fixing the problem far more expensive for ordinary county residents.
In October 2025 we asked the council to amend the Triennial Review of the Water Supply and Sewerage Master Plan to require a comprehensive review by outside experts of the methodology and information used by DPWT to a) prepare the Basic Services Sewerage Map and b) review individual development plans to determine whether public sewerage facilities are adequate to support the development described in the plans. Last November we requested that the County Council invite the Director of Public Works and Transportation (DPWT) and the County Attorney, as well as a representative of the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), to appear before the council to inform council members and the public about the claims by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and MDE that the County is not complying with the terms and conditions of the 2005 Sanitary Sewer Overflow Consent Decree.
No member of the council responded to either request. We hope that going forward the council will fulfill its responsibility to make sure that the county’s public sewer system is not jeopardizing the environment and public health by holding a public hearing and requiring DPWT to disclose their methodology for determining adequate sanitary sewer capacity in the Jones Falls Sewershed.
Beth Miller
Executive Committee Green Towson Alliance
Beth,
Thank you for your thoughtful representation of GTA and our West Towson community.