New Community Meeting!
We hope you can join us on Wednesday, December 10, 2025, from 6:30 - 7:30 pm, at the Burleigh Manor Middle School, in the Media Center. 4200 Centennial Lane, Ellicott City, MD. 21042 to learn more about the stream project that Howard County Parks and Recreation has proposed for the Font Hill Wetlands Park and the next steps we can take.
A group of middle school students will be making a presentation and discussing action items that the community can take next. There will also be a set of the design plans from the county webpage for the project available for review and feedback.
We hope to see you on the 10th!
Help Stop the Font Hill Wetlands Park Stream Restoration.
Please sign our Petition Here: https://c.org/H94fcMW82x
Please send Calvin Ball an email here and ask him to stop this project.
Please write to the Howard County Council here to stop this project.
Please send an email to our other representatives on our take action page.
Please print and distribute this Information sheet developed by Ken Bawer.
Please view these videos developed by local Hydrologist Bob Dover here.
Howard County will destroy habitat for Eagles, River Otters, Beavers, Owls and hundreds of other inhabitants of this ecosystem!
The Howard County will be performing a stream “restoration” to obtain MS4 credits. Stream “restorations” are destructive practices that are not supported by science yet are promoted by stormwater bureaucrats, engineers, developers and the politicians they own.
The County describes this project as a "final phase" of the stabilization work, but it is actually just repairs of failed structures that were constructed during previous stream restorations in 2007 and 2019. Most stream restorations eventually fail and end up sending more sediment and pollution to the Bay. Hundreds of trees will be killed to allow access for the heavy equipment required to do this unnecessary work. Thousands of animals at the bottom of the food chain will be killed by the heavy equipment used in this project. The money wasted on this project could be used to plant trees or build thousands of rain gardens which is the real solution.
This was a stream restoration done last year on the Little Patuxent River. This backhoe dumped tons of sediment and pollutants into the stream, exactly the opposite of what these projects claim to do.
A recently completed stream restoration in Mt Hebron that seriously reduced home values and destroyed the existing woods. The neighbors who attended the presentation by the County were totally unaware of what was going to happen to their neighborhood.
Eroded stream bank on recently "restored" Little Patuxent River south of Frederick Road.
Background
Although restoration may sound like a good thing, this project is a very bad idea. The EPA and the state of Maryland require the counties to reduce the amount of pollution and sediment being sent to the Chesapeake Bay under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The idea of protecting the Bay with stream restorations is not supported by good science. There may be some small studies that support stream restorations, however, in 2014 Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland completed a meta-study of 644 stream restorations and showed that stream restorations do not work. Stream restorations are based on engineering models that make predictions that do not hold up to scientific scrutiny. The EPA's own Inspector General criticized the EPA for claiming that the Chesapeake Bay is improving. The EPA's false claims are based on predictive models rather than actual evidence of improvements. This project will destroy the woods around the stream and the habitat it provides for the fish, animals and birds that live there. These types of stream restorations do not follow the spirit of the law which is to protect the environment. They make no attempt to quantify the ecological damage being done to be balanced against the supposed benefits of stream restorations.
Howard County's own 2022 NPDES report to the state on pages 61-64 refers to various watersheds. Regarding the Wilde Lake watershed: "Overall, the stream system in the Wilde Lake watershed continues to exhibit evidence of the urban stressors affecting it and has not demonstrated measured improvement in either habitat quality or ecological stream health over the seventeen years of monitoring...Overall, implementation of projects in the watershed do not appear to have significantly improved the physical habitat in the tributary streams." Regarding the Red hill Branch watershed: "In Red Hill Branch, post-restoration monitoring results indicate a subwatershed in an overall degraded ecological condition, with little change from the first two years of pre-restoration monitoring...The biological community and habitat continue to fluctuate slightly from year-to-year, with 2022 results a slight decrease from 2021, but remain in a degraded condition and have not shown any significant improvement after restoration." In Dorsey Hall: "Two sites were added, one on Red Hill Branch at Columbia Rd downstream of all restoration activities, and one site near the downstream end of Plumtree Branch upstream of its confluence with Red Hill Branch to measure effects of stormwater coming from the untreated Plumtree Branch... The physical habitat results show that both sites are severely impacted, most likely from urban development with no evidence yet of ecological uplift after restoration." (Note: referring to the Plumtree Branch as untreated is incorrect because the county restored the unnamed tributary to the Plumtree Branch in 2017. This is the project that is just south of the Northfield /Dunloggin school athletic fields.)
Howard County's own 2022 NPDES report to the state on pages 61-64 refers to various watersheds. Regarding the Wilde Lake watershed: "Overall, the stream system in the Wilde Lake watershed continues to exhibit evidence of the urban stressors affecting it and has not demonstrated measured improvement in either habitat quality or ecological stream health over the seventeen years of monitoring...Overall, implementation of projects in the watershed do not appear to have significantly improved the physical habitat in the tributary streams." Regarding the Red hill Branch watershed: "In Red Hill Branch, post-restoration monitoring results indicate a subwatershed in an overall degraded ecological condition, with little change from the first two years of pre-restoration monitoring...The biological community and habitat continue to fluctuate slightly from year-to-year, with 2022 results a slight decrease from 2021, but remain in a degraded condition and have not shown any significant improvement after restoration." In Dorsey Hall: "Two sites were added, one on Red Hill Branch at Columbia Rd downstream of all restoration activities, and one site near the downstream end of Plumtree Branch upstream of its confluence with Red Hill Branch to measure effects of stormwater coming from the untreated Plumtree Branch... The physical habitat results show that both sites are severely impacted, most likely from urban development with no evidence yet of ecological uplift after restoration." (Note: referring to the Plumtree Branch as untreated is incorrect because the county restored the unnamed tributary to the Plumtree Branch in 2017. This is the project that is just south of the Northfield /Dunloggin school athletic fields.)
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has serious questions about stream restorations, as discussed in this podcast Here. It is 12 minutes long but their concerns are mostly near the end.
The table below is from a Howard County document titled Countywide Implementation Strategy 2017. Howard_County_CIS_2017-12-18.pdf (squarespace.com)
The county is required by law to reduce the amount of sediment and pollutants going to the Bay. BMPs are Best Management Practices which are different things that can be done to reduce sediment and pollutants such as stream restorations, stormwater management ponds, and planting trees. I am not sure what BMP conversions are, possibly converting dry stormwater management ponds into wet ones, but they are probably a limited number of opportunities for that. The big takeaway from this table is that it explains why the county does so many stream restorations, it is the cheapest way to meet their regulatory obligations to save the Bay. Stormwater management ponds which reduce the amount of water getting to the streams in the first place are the better alternative, but they are New BMP which cost more in the short term. This table purports to be some sort of cost benefit analysis but it shows a fundamental flaw in the whole system, the environmental cost is not even acknowledged.
There are many alternatives to this work that the county should be doing. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) say that localities should not overly rely on stream restorations to reduce the sediment and pollutants going to the bay. Instead localities should reduce the amount of water entering the stream, upstream of where the erosion is occurring.