Blue Water Baltimore

Programs: Education, advocacy and outreach - blue water baltimore investigates reported pollution, enforces clean water legislation and advocates for important initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels that are critical to protecting our streams and rivers, ensuring public health and safety, and improving the quality of life for all maryland residents. Blue water baltimore settled a successful enforcement action against a scrap metal recycling facility for stormwater permit violations and worked cooperatively with maryland department of environment on several pollution investigation cases at construction sites and concrete facilities, both of which led to improved enforcement of stormwater permits and directly reduced water pollution. With our intervenor status in the baltimore city sewage lawsuit, blue water baltimore successfully advocated for significant improvements to the modified consent decree including a building backup reimbursement program, prioritization of projects to address these backups, increased requirements for public notification of financial expenditures, and expanded opportunities for public comment on key implementation plans.

stormwater reduction - to reduce the volume of rain water runoff, or stormwater, flowing into storm drains and streams from institutional properties, and is an overall effort to reduce flooding in streams, to reduce nutrient, sediment and other pollution from entering local streams and ultimately the chesapeake bay. Blue water baltimore removed 8,531 square feet of impervious surface through stormwater projects that treated 1. 5 million gallons of stormwater; 13 rain gardens totaling 11,442 square feet, treating a total of 97,758 square feet of impervious surface.

greening/nursery - blue water baltimore's herring run nursery grows plants, trees and shrubs native to the mid-atlantic region. These plants are used in restoration projects and to sell to residents or wholesale customers. Specialties of our landscaping program also include designing and installing rain gardens and low maintenance native landscapes in an effort to reduce storm runoff. In 2017, we sold 26,000 native plants with the help of over 300 volunteers. Blue water baltimore's community forestry program planted 3,060 trees in parks, schools, residents and along neighborhood streets. We also engaged homeowners to plant over 593 trees in their yards through tree giveaways and a yard tree incentive and planting program. These trees are maintained through our summer jobs program described below. Our street tree program also removed 23,936 square feet of concrete by creating and expanding tree pits along 1. 9 miles of "green streets". Our forestry program employs 5 individual's full time and 4 part time. We also operate a summer jobs program to maintain our tree plantings, 11 high school interns and 2 team leaders provided tree maintenance to our trees over the summer. High school interns are employed through baltimore's youthworks, the city's summer jobs program. Together, the team maintained over 4,000 trees while gaining valuable job skills for the future.