On May 7, 2018, the County Council tabled CB21-2018. The County Executive has stated that county legislation should follow state legislation from the MDA, MDE, and Highway Department, which is being revised in 2018.
Read the national Sierra Club policy on mulching.
County Bill 60 expired on November 5, 2017. ZRA 183 was introduced to the Planning Board on 1/11/2018 and was approved on on March 1, 2018. A public hearing on the bill, CB21-2018, was held on April 16, 2018. Our testimony is given below. The vote is scheduled for ay 7, 2018.
Sierra Club Howard County
Testimony in Opposition to CB21-2018
April 16, 2018
The Sierra Club policy is that farmland should be used for farming. Mulch and compost are used on farms, and they may be produced on farms from waste. Like any other commodity produced on a farm, these commodities should be saleable. However, no farm has enough waste, or needs enough mulch and compost, to justify industrial-scale processing onsite. At that scale, wood waste is shipped in by tractor trailer and mulch is shipped out by dump truck; everything from spoiled food to dead animals to manure is collected and decomposed for export as compost. In the industrial process, the raw materials are not produced on the land and the finished products are not used on the land. This is manufacturing, not farming.
Manufacturing should be done on land zoned for manufacturing, as this bill specifies. The processing setup should have dust filtration, leachate recovery, fire-fighting equipment, and whatever else is needed to safeguard the environment and the workers.
The land zoned for manufacturing is taxed at a rate that represents the cost to society of industrial pollution, noise, and heavy traffic, as well as the higher profits of factory production. Farmland, on the other hand, is subsidized with lower taxes and even payments for permanent preservation. Our zoning laws and our tax laws are meant to protect our countryside and our agricultural resources. To use farmland for industry seems like an exemption that serves only to allow an unfair business advantage to one industrialist over another.
To help farm-owners succeed at farming, we allow some conditional uses of farmland. These are side businesses that take up little land and add to, but don't replace, the agricultural income: a snowball stand, for example. Industrial manufacturing of mulch and compost is nothing like a snowball stand. A snowball stand doesn't occupy 3 acres of land, it doesn't require tractor-trailers to haul in the raw materials, it doesn’t earn industrial profits and it doesn't endanger the health and safety of everyone around it.
We want to allow the small-scale agricultural production and sale of these commodities, but not allow large-scale industrial processing and sales. The difference is quantitative. We should be able to set limits by considering the volume of material collected and produced, the amount of land used, the amount of money earned, and the size and nature of the equipment used, to allow farmers to farm but prevent industrialists from exploiting our farmland for industry. The bill as currently written does not seem to close that loophole and therefore we must oppose it as written.
Joanne Heckman
Chair
Howard County Sierra Club
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CB 60-2017: An Act allowing certain composting facilities and natural wood waste facilities under certain conditions in certain districts
Sierra Club Position: Opposed
Date of Public Hearing: September 11, 2017
Howard County Sierra Club testimony:
Honorable Howard County Councilmembers,
The Howard County group of the Maryland Sierra Club opposes CB 60-2017. The expansion of mulching and composting operations would have an extensive negative environmental impact on Howard County farmland and the surrounding environments. Wide-scale mulching would increase the chance of fires in rural areas, including in some places where water is not easily accessible.[1] Industrial mulching would also increase the chance that aquifers and drinking water become contaminated with leachate and stormwater runoff if not properly treated prior to disposal. This is, in part, because the bill would allow wood-processing facilities to be set-back within 100 ft — as opposed to 200 feet, as it stands now — of streams and wetlands. Mulching would also increase residents’ exposure to fungi and carcinogens from the wood dust released by mulching facilities.[2] And all agricultural areas would experience a sizable drop in air quality, as wood-processing facilities open and tractor-trailers transport their product.
This bill would potentially hand large swaths of agricultural preserve land and farmland over to industrial mulching facilities, as it allows for 5 acres of mulching plus 5 acres of composting on all RR and RC of 100+ acres, through a Conditional Use hearing only. It is necessary to protect long-term farming productivity on all agricultural farmland because there’s no Comprehensive Land Use Plan in place. On top of losing the preserves land and active farmland, these industrial facilities would add additional stressors to the environment by increasing the fire risk, groundwater contamination, air-borne fungi and carcinogens, and decreased air quality on the environment by importing the vast majority of their raw materials and exporting the vast majority of their end product. That’s in addition to the environmental stressors as outlined already caused by ongoing residential and commercial building expansion throughout the county.
On these grounds, the Sierra Club is opposed to any commercial sale of mulch from all RR / RC and farmland parcels, any commercial trucks greater than 2 axles on farms with mulch/compost imports and exports, mulching on Howard County ag preserve or Maryland ag preserve farmland and farmland, and sale of mulch or compost product on site. The bottom line is that Natural Wood Waste Recycling operations belong on M-1 and M-2 industrial zoned parcels — not on agricultural preserves or farmland. We cannot allow groundwater contamination plus mulch dust and endospores from air borne contamination to put nearby environments and communities at risk.
Ken Clark
Group Chair
Howard County Sierra Club
kenclark7@live.com
Founded in 1892, the Sierra Club is America’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization. We encourage our members, individually and collectively, to “Explore, enjoy and protect the planet.” We have chapters in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, with more than 600,000 members nationwide, including more than 1000 members in the Howard County Group.
Testimony delivered May 19, 2014 regarding zoning regulations on agricultural preservation (mulch/compost)
Delivered by Joanne Heckman, representing the Sierra Club; Conservation Chair of the Howard County Group.
The Howard County Sierra Club supports the Dayton Rural Preservation Society in their campaign to establish zoning regulations that preserve agricultural land for agriculture and prevent industrial operations and other inappropriate use of agricultural land.
The Sierra Club has more than two million members and supporters, 40,000 of them right here in Maryland. The strength of the Sierra Club derives from consistent policies applied on every level, from the national Sierra Club to the state and county groups. One of the most fundamental goals of the Sierra Club is land preservation, and the fundamental principle is: keep wilderness wild, keep parkland for parks, and keep farmland for farms. In particular, I'm going to quote national Sierra Club policy, which can be found at the Sierra Club website:
- Land should not be converted from those agricultural uses which protect long-term resource productivity.
- Zoning...should be structured to serve as a substantive control over conversion of agricultural lands.
- Those seeking to convert land to other uses should bear the burden of proving that the proposed new use is more important to current and future public welfare and that there is no other feasible location for the proposed use.
In Howard County I think we all agree that we want to support farming, and at the same time, restrict "other uses", such as industry, to the "feasible location for the proposed use". The zoning regulations will have to be carefully worded to achieve this. Some proposals have addressed the acreage or the activities allowed for conditional use, or the scale or commercial intent of the activities allowed. For the environmental community, the best regulations will be those that prohibit any use of farmland in ways that are deleterious to land, air, water, or health. Thank you.