The city’s premier water advocacy group is pushing back on the Scott administration’s plan to delay by 16 years the deadline for ending the sewage releases that regularly contaminate Baltimore Harbor and other local waterways.

Lengthening the Modified Consent Decree from 2030 to 2046 “is a major modification that requires formal renegotiations with EPA, MDE and the local community, not quiet approval,” Blue Water Baltimore argued this week.

The proposed extension would result in city residents experiencing sewage overflows – sometimes in nearby streams, other times bubbling up in their own basements and streets – for nearly five decades.

Instituted in 2002, the court-ordered decree was originally set to terminate in 2016, but was extended to 2030, with most of the major construction work ordered to be completed by 2022.

“We urge the Department of Public Works, MDE and EPA to adopt a transparent, equitable and science-based Phase II Plan that ends sewage pollution once and for all,” said the watchdog group, calling for the 2030 deadline to remain in place for ongoing construction projects.

Even if the city can’t reach 100% compliance by 2030, EPA and MDE should maintain “zero tolerance” for sewage spills in ecologically sensitive areas, including the Inner Harbor, which was subject in recent months to sewage inflows, fish kills and the foul-smelling pistachio tide.

“DPW needs to understand and prioritize the most-impacted neighborhoods in their work to stop sewage overflows,” Blue Water Baltimore Harborkeeper Alice Volpitta says in letter to DPW Director Matthew Garbark, joined by Jennifer Kunze of Clean Water Action Maryland.

Calling the consent decree not just a legal document but a promise of equity fulfilling basic human rights, they note that low-income and Black neighborhoods have primarily borne the burden of basement backups and flooding despite years of continuous water and sewer rate hikes.

Just this year, the sewage rate for city customers jumped 18.06%, the highest in history, according to DPW.

“Baltimore City’s affordability and financial risk assessments rightly point out that the city’s Water4All customer assistance program only covers household incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty level, which leaves a significant portion of the population living just above the poverty line but facing financial hardship,” the groups’ statement said.

“These are the same households already at a higher risk of experiencing sewage backups into their homes and the financial ruin they can cause,” it continued.

• Tonight at 6 p.m. DPW will hold a mandated public information meeting on the Modified Consent Decree at the Cylburn Arboretum’s Vollmer Center, 4915 Greenspring Avenue. 

The delays and escalating costs surrounding the consent decree have been a staple of Brew reporting.

When the city failed to meet the 2016 deadline, it agreed to close down all “structured overflows,” or pipes engineered to release sewage-saturated water into streams during heavy storms, by 2022.

While many small SSO (sanitary sewer overflow) pipes were plugged by that date, the five biggest structures – Outfalls 67, 72, 152 and 154, feeding into the lower Jones Falls, and the sewer stack at 3900 Belair Road, emptying into Herring Run – remain open.

Collectively, those outfalls have released over 78 million gallons of untreated sewage water between 2023 and 2025, according to DPW records, with the amount varying based on the total amount of rainfall and the individual intensity of a storm.

In its latest report to EPA and MDE, the city says the four outfalls on Jones Falls are still active during storms because of the hydraulic limitations of the Stony Run Pump Station, which create backups at the station and along three miles of deteriorated mains along and near Stony Run. (The pump station is next to the much-discussed Sisson Street Citizen Drop-Off Center.)

DPW says it will undertake interceptor cleaning and will rehabilitate the pump station between 2026 and 2029, and hopes for “SSO structure elimination” along the Jones Falls by December 31, 2030.

But other projects needed to increase wet-weather hydraulic capacity in sewer mains won’t get underway until the mid or late 2030s, with scheduled completions as late as December 31, 2046.

Future Delays

Even these decades-long extensions are deceptive, says Volpitta, because they don’t include 24 months worth of sewage flow monitoring required after construction is completed in 2046, not to speak of the final closeout report to state and federal officials.

“This means the new plan extends the final deadline to at least 2049,” Volpitta noted. By that time, Baltimore City would have been under this consent decree for 47 years.

The lack of progress by Baltimore County in rehabilitating its own sewer system, which feeds into the city system, has added to the cost burden and number of sewage spills.

“A proposed schedule that openly extends construction completion to 2046 – and final compliance to at least 2049 – constitutes a material deviation from the Modified Consent Decree and cannot be implemented without a formal, transparent modification approved by the court,” she says.

Complicating matters further, a significant portion of the sewage handled by Baltimore originates in Baltimore County, whose own pipe rehabilitation work remains incomplete despite being under its own consent decree since 2005.

“Insufficient county rehabilitation directly limits the city’s ability to meet its own Level of Protection standards. Without clear county commitments and accountability, the city will continue to suffer an inequitable burden of sewage overflows, backups and waterway pollution,” Volpitta says, adding:

“The city and county are intrinsically linked. We have a regional water and sewer system, regardless of how it is currently administered.”