Land use policies and Chesapeake Bay

Chesapeake Bay

With a six-state, 64,000-square-mile drainage basin, the Chesapeake Bay has the highest ratio of land area to water area of any bay in the United States. The activities conducted on this land directly affect pollution levels in the Bay, and they do so in complex and varied ways. (Field 2006 p.331-340) Agricultural land management practices; chemical use; population growth and density; the extent of impervious surfaces such as roads; and natural factors such as soils, climate, and hydrology all interact to determine the Bay's water quality conditions and aquatic health.

The policy debate thus far has concerned itself less with the breakdown of land uses into agriculture, forestry, other open space, and urbanized uses than with the activities conducted on those lands. Point and no point source policies are generally established assuming that land uses are fixed and exogenous. Furthermore, the coordination of point and no point source instruments with land use policy instruments and the role that economic incentive-based land use instruments can play in efficiently achieving water quality goals have been given only minimal attention.

Existing policy addresses point sources—sources of pollution that can be attributed to specific, “end of pipe” locations such as wastewater treatment plants—through technology-based standards requiring “best available technology economically achievable.” No point sources, which consist of runoff from agricultural lands, construction sites, and urban areas, as well as septic system leakage and emissions into the air from stationary and mobile sources, are addressed in a variety of ways. (Brueckner 2005 p.383-407) Agricultural and storm water runoff are handled mostly through sets of voluntary “best management practices” (BMPs) while air emissions are addressed through regulatory controls and standards placed on those sources.

These policies do not consider the broader question of how and where land should be allocated among urban uses, agricultural uses, and forestry and other open spaces to best promote the health of the Bay. State and especially local governments do concern themselves with patterns of land use, employing zoning and other local policy and planning tools to alter land use patterns. However, they do not generally have the Bay's water quality as their primary focus. Moreover, local land policies are set at the county or city level, not at a watershed or even river basin level. Therefore, local policies such as zoning regulations are established to achieve only local goals and ignore the spill over effects on other counties. In addition, land policies tend not to be coordinated with more direct regulations affecting water quality such as those affecting no point and point sources of pollution.

With the movement toward establishment of “total maximum daily loads” (TMDLs), some of this may change. More focus will be placed on no point sources and on the effect of different land uses on actual measured water quality. (Field 2006 p.331-340) As more is learned about the effects of different sources of pollution on water quality and as greater levels of control must be achieved, there is also likely to be increasing interest in ...