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Maryland
Advocates, Lawmakers Hope 2025 Will Be the Year Maryland Stops Subsidizing Trash Incineration – Inside Climate News
For more than a decade, Maryland Sen. Karen Lewis Young tried to get the state to pull the plug on public subsidies for trash incineration, a form of energy that’s considered dirtier than coal. None of the bills have crossed the finish line.
Then came a phone call as she was pulling into her driveway a few weeks ago. On the other end of the line was Bill Ferguson, the Senate president. “He said, ‘This is the year I’m not only going to support the bill, I want to sponsor that bill,’” recalled the Democrat from Frederick County.
On Oct. 18, Ferguson announced he will sponsor legislation in the upcoming General Assembly session to remove waste incineration from the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), the state’s incentives program for renewable energy projects.
“I’ve become increasingly concerned about emissions from the BRESCO incinerator as a public health and environmental justice issue for surrounding neighborhoods,” Ferguson said of the WIN Waste incinerator (formerly known as Wheelabrator and BRESCO), the largest stationary source of industrial air pollution in Baltimore.
Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season.
Located off I-95, next to the city’s most disadvantaged communities, the incinerator emits hazardous pollutants including mercury, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter. Those noxious emissions contribute to respiratory issues, heart conditions and other serious health problems, particularly in adjoining neighborhoods.
“As we take steps to incentivize true, clean energy in Maryland, 2025 must be the year that we remove waste incineration from our Renewable Portfolio Standard,” Ferguson declared.
Under Maryland law, electricity providers can buy renewable energy credits (RECs) sold by energy providers—including trash incinerators—and pass the costs of those credits on to consumers in their energy bills. RECs are issued when one megawatt-hour of electricity is generated and delivered to the grid from a renewable energy source.
Lewis Young said she was happy to see Ferguson go from being on the fence a year ago to fully supporting the efforts to deny millions in public dollars to incineration companies.
She’d opposed trash incineration before she entered the Maryland General Assembly in 2015. “For me, the No. 1 issue was the negative environmental effects of burning trash,” she said. “We were spending, on average, $17 million a year to incentivize dirty energy. That money could be better spent elsewhere, not only financial resources but job growth in clean energy industries.”
She said her research led her to believe that more than 80 percent of dirty energy sources like incinerators were located in communities where 25 percent or more of the population identified as either minority or lived below the federal poverty line. “Because of those reasons, I got increasingly enthusiastic and determined to get trash incineration removed as clean energy,” she said.
In the 2024 legislative session, Lewis Young sponsored the Reclaim Renewable Energy Act, which proposed excluding energy derived from burning waste from the RPS. The bill failed to advance out of committee in either chamber.
It was the seventh consecutive year a bill seeking an end to a public subsidy for trash incineration failed to pass. In 2023, a similar bill proposing the removal of trash incineration, factory farm gas and woody biomass from the RPS met the same fate. Because the 2024 bill focused solely on ending credits for trash incineration, advocates were hopeful about its passage. But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, refused to get behind the bill, attracting the ire of environmentalists.
It’s anyone’s guess if the Moore administration will act differently in the 2025 legislative session. Carter Elliott, a press secretary for the governor, provided a written comment that did not answer the question: “The governor looks forward to working with the state legislature, local leaders, and advocates on behalf of all Marylanders this upcoming session. The Moore administration is working with all partners involved to ensure that we are continuing to put forward legislation that will make Maryland safer.”
Incinerators have been eligible for public subsidies through the state’s clean energy credit system since then-Gov. Martin O’Malley signed legislation in 2011 declaring the electricity generated from burning trash a “tier one” renewable energy, on par with wind and solar.
Also called “waste-to-energy” facilities, trash incinerators like those operated by WIN Waste convert non-hazardous, non-recyclable materials into usable energy through combustion. They also release hundreds of thousands of tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide every year in addition to PM2.5—extremely small particles that get into blood and lungs.
With Ferguson’s support, Lewis Young is hopeful the General Assembly will finally remove trash incineration as “tier one” renewable energy.
Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat from Montgomery County, said she was thrilled to hear of the Senate president’s commitment. “It’s a very good sign, and I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to make it a reality. Nothing’s a done deal until the entire General Assembly votes to make it happen. And while I join in the optimism, we’re going to continue to work to make sure that it happens.”
Charkoudian stressed that the 2024 legislation was about ending the public subsidy for incineration and is unrelated to the question about waste management. Incineration companies wrongly asserted at the time that removal of the subsidy will lead to waste management problems, she said.
She said that incineration does not belong in the RPS and public dollars should be used to increase the amount of real clean energy on the grid: solar, onshore and offshore wind and hydro.
She said that taking away this subsidy will not make a difference in whether these plants continue to operate. “If you look at their profits and revenue statements, there’s zero evidence to suggest that taking this subsidy away would result in the closure of the plants.”
Charkoudian is also working on a separate “Clean Resource Adequacy Bill” to be introduced in the upcoming session that aims to restructure the RPS, bringing in as much new clean energy generation to the grid as possible while rapidly adding energy storage.
Mary Urban, communications director for WIN Waste Innovations, said the company has recently invested nearly $50 million to upgrade the facility. “Similar legislation has been introduced over the past several years, but each proposal undermined the Renewable Portfolio Standard program’s goal to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” she said in emailed comments.
Urban added that Maryland generates minimal energy from wind and solar and relies predominantly on energy from nuclear, natural gas and coal. “Excluding waste-to-energy (WTE) from the RPS requires Marylanders to subsidize out-of-state businesses while ignoring the work WIN does to divert waste from landfills and reduce greenhouse gases while avoiding fossil fuels,” she added.
Between 2012 and 2030, Maryland is set to pay more than $300 million to trash incinerators, according to a March analysis by the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Clean Water Action and Progressive Maryland. It showed that the participating trash incinerators emitted more CO2 per megawatt-hour than any other energy sources included in the RPS. Among the facilities operating in Maryland, the WIN Waste incinerator in Baltimore City emitted the highest amount of CO2, estimated at 690,033 tons per year.
In 2022, the most money went to Covanta, which owns and operates a trash incinerator in Lorton, Virginia, and pocketed $11.7 million, the data showed. WIN Waste Innovations, which owns and operates the incinerator in Baltimore, received about $4.2 million through the sale of RECs.
In the past 10 years, the report said, the price of RECs sold by trash incinerators increased more than sevenfold. They are now more expensive than RECs affiliated with wind, a clean, renewable energy source.
Ferguson’s announcement has energized community groups and environmental organizations who have long voiced their opposition to burning trash for energy at public expense.
Jennifer Kunze, Maryland director for Clean Water Action, called Ferguson’s statement a “game changer” and the result of his constituents making sure this issue remains a priority. She said the communities impacted by trash incineration have been “really loud and consistent for years” in highlighting it as a major climate and environmental justice problem that needs to be addressed.
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She said that there’s still a lot of work that needs to happen between now and the end of the legislative session in April, particularly for making sure that the bill moves forward in both House and Senate committees. “We are really looking for the House now to make it known early that this bill is going to be an environmental justice priority,” Kunze said, adding that a lot depends on House Speaker Adrienne Jones and C. T. Wilson, chair of the House Economic Matters Committee.
“We’re really looking to Gov. Moore, the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Maryland Energy Administration to issue a similar public statement that trash incineration needs to come out of the RPS and won’t be part of the state’s clean energy plan,” Kunze said.
Separately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating a federal civil rights complaint alleging that Baltimore City’s 10-year solid waste plan failed to commit necessary resources to end the city’s reliance on the WIN Waste incinerator.
The South Baltimore Community Land Trust, the community group that filed the complaint along with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Environmental Integrity Project, called Ferguson’s announcement “a critical step forward for environmental justice.” In a statement, the group said: “South Baltimore residents have long suffered the health and development impacts of the BRESCO incinerator—the largest single source of air pollution in Baltimore and the source of toxic ash filling the city’s landfill also located in the neighborhood.”
Kim Coble, executive director of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, said the lack of progress on trash incineration during the last legislative session was listed in her group’s 2024 environmental scorecard as an impediment to the state’s transition to clean energy.
Coble said the inability to remove polluting energy sources from the RPS was one of the many bills with environmental justice implications that the 2024 General Assembly session failed to make progress on.
“Unfortunately, none of the bills passed that were directly related to environmental justice. So that’s a problem. The same with climate and energy,” she said. “And none of the three bills related to generating revenue [for climate action] got out of the committee.”
Lewis Young said issues of energy and climate action will take center stage during the upcoming General Assembly session. She expects bills calling for making polluters pay—that type of proposal “met some pushback” from the administration last year, she said, alluding to the Responding to Emergency Needs from Extreme Weather (RENEW) Act. The bill, which failed to pass, aimed to make oil and gas companies pay for their pollution.
Other bills calling for new penalties and incentives will also likely drop next year to generate momentum for meeting the state’s climate and emissions reduction goals, she said.
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Maryland
“Zero” tolerance for harassment after Maryland election worker was followed, election official says
BALTIMORE — The Maryland State Board of Elections says there is “zero tolerance” for harassment or threats against election workers after one was followed in Carroll County on Wednesday.
The election worker reported being followed, creating an “unsettling situation,” while checking a ballot drop box. The election official has sought a peace order against the person.
“I have an absolute ZERO tolerance for harassment or making threats against election officials,” State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis said in a social media post. “They have the highest level of integrity & need to do their mission in a safe environment.”
The Carroll County Sheriff’s Office said the election worker had been followed from the polling center to the election office but there was not any contact made with the worker.
The person told deputies they followed the worker to ensure the ballots that had been dropped off were taken to the election office. That individual was told to refrain from any actions that would be harassing or intimidating.
“The election official filed a report with my office when a poll watcher followed her back to elections HQ at the end of the night to make sure ballots were being dropped appropriately,” Carroll County Sheriff James DeWees said. “The election judge felt intimidated by the incident. We warned the individual and she no longer is at the early voting site.”
DeMarinis pointed out that a new law beefs up penalties for threats against officials.
“When questioning turns to harassment or threatening behavior against election officials, a stand must occur. I applaud the election official for making that stand,” DeMarinis said. “I want to thank the General Assembly and Governor Moore for the passage of the Protection of the Election Officials Act earlier this year. That proactive measure brought comfort to our community, knowing that they understand and support our mission.”
The Protection of the Election Officials Act prohibits a person from knowingly and willfully making a threat to harm an election official or an immediate family member of an election official because of the election official’s role in administering the election process.
A person who violates the Act is subject to imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine not exceeding $2,500, or both.
Maryland
When do Maryland polls open and close for the 2024 election? Voting hours to know
BALTIMORE — On November 5, Maryland polls will be open for the 2024 election between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.
To vote, you’ll need to go to your assigned polling place.
How to find your voting location
You can find your assigned polling place by visiting the Maryland State Board of Elections website and searching your address.
Voters can also find their voting districts and local board of elections.
If you requested a mail-in ballot and now want to vote in person, you will need to cancel your mail-in ballot via Maryland’s Online Voter Registration System.
Does your polling place change automatically if you move?
If you’ve already changed your address on your driver’s license or state ID, your polling place will be changed automatically. If you haven’t officially changed your address, you’ll need to make sure you’re registered at your current address to vote.
Where do I drop off mail-in ballots in Maryland?
Marylanders can use a ballot drop box to return their mail-in ballot. Click here to find the General Elections ballot drop box locations.
Maryland
When past and progress collide on the Eastern Shore
The combine kicked up a cloud of dust as it rolled past, snatching soybeans out of Eastern Shore dirt. Across the road, another combine did the same. It’s a familiar harvest season scene in Kent County, where more than half the acreage is considered prime farmland.
Albert Nickerson leaned on the back of his Ford pickup and watched his brother-in-law pilot the giant harvester. Nickerson doesn’t work the land, but his wife is a sixth-generation farmer. His oldest son is seventh. Nickerson is a contractor and Republican county commissioner. His blue eyes welled with tears when he talked about how much this place means to him.
“Short of my kids, my wife, God, I mean this is just right up there with the next thing to be important for me,” he said.
With 19,188 residents, Kent County is Maryland’s smallest by population. Grain sales are an $89.5 million industry, second-highest in Maryland. Geographically isolated, the county’s sprawling farms and multigenerational farmers give it a frozen-in-time feel.
But a pandemic influx of wealthy outsiders, remote workers and early retirees from liberal enclaves like Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia — native Kent Countians might call them “chicken-neckers” or “come-heres” — is nudging the county’s electorate to the left.
Gov. Wes Moore won the county in 2022, the first time since 1986 that a Democrat in the governor’s race prevailed, and President Joe Biden won the county in 2020, after residents had picked Republicans in the previous two elections.
As this Election Day nears, the presidential race pits former President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” against Vice President Kamala Harris’s “A New Way Forward.” In places like Kent County, those aren’t just campaign slogans. These communities are trying to balance tradition and progress without a clear roadmap for the future.
Kent County’s newcomers are mostly moving to Chestertown, the county seat nestled on the banks of the Chester River. With slightly more than 5,500 residents and a bustling downtown with shops, restaurants and a glut of 18th century homes to rival Annapolis, Chestertown might as well be the poster child for the small-town America that moneyed city dwellers sought out during the heights of COVID-19.
They own second homes, or they commute back to their urban centers for work. One woman, a real estate agent named Kat Conley, said she has split time between Chestertown and D.C. for more than a decade.
It does not take many people to swing an election here (Biden won the county by 134 votes), and the population is so small it doesn’t much factor into statewide or national contests. But the blue shift could have wide-ranging implications for local matters.
“I think that Kent County is a microcosm of the entire country,” Nickerson said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to travel to some places. I was in Colorado a few years ago, and I was talking to a ranch manager, and we were talking about the same exact thing going on out there.”
The ranch manager spoke of billionaires flooding in and trying to change the area’s way of life.
Fewer people work on farms in Kent County than in years past as automation increases. And most everything that’s grown isn’t even for human consumption — it’s used for chicken feed.
Kent County is surrounded on three sides by water, and people used to make a living off the Chesapeake Bay. The number of watermen is dwindling, too. The most reliable employers are the Dixon Valve & Coupling Company, which makes hose fittings, and the LaMotte Company, which makes water-test kits.
The public school system has seen declining enrollment, and in 2020, the county recorded a population loss for the first time since the 1940 Census. The county’s median age is nearly a decade older than Maryland’s, and fewer people have college degrees than the state average.
The county’s overall changes can seem at odds with the scene in Chestertown. On a recent October weekend, there were packed restaurants, crowded sidewalks, a classic car meet and a farmers market that shut down the town’s main street. It’s also a liberal bubble.
Pride flags hang from storefronts, and placards that proclaim all races, genders and sexual orientations are welcome hang in windows. Where Trump signs dominate the countryside, it’s not uncommon to see downtown homes displaying yard signs supporting Harris.
One such home belongs to Michael McDowell, an Irishman who arrived in Chestertown by way of D.C. A former journalist who had a second career working in international relations, McDowell moved to town in 2017 when he and his wife purchased an 18th century home that was first owned by a member of the Continental Army who had slaves.
Seated in an armchair in his meticulously preserved, wood-paneled living room, McDowell — amid plenty of asides about national politics and his views of the Republican county commission (the three deplorables, he called them) — described a sort of intellectual elite that make up many of Chestertown’s historic homeowners.
“It’s a fascinating community,” he said. “We have law partners, surgeons, psychiatrists, State Department people, USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. Oh, we’ve got six CIA people.”
A self-described social democrat, McDowell said the appeal of Chestertown for these older elites is its unique blend of an urban environment and tight-knit community. But their presence has a drawback for the non-elites: The cost of housing has skyrocketed in recent years. McDowell and his wife bought their home for $368,000. A Zillow estimate suggests the house would sell for twice that now.
Kent County has the sixth-highest property tax rate of any county in Maryland. Chestertown levies an additional tax and, combined with the county’s, the property tax rate for town residents is greater than that for Annapolis residents. McDowell said he and his wife have an annual tax bill of $8,000.
High property values and relative population density have given the town an outsized importance in the county’s economic picture.
Owen Bailey, a town native and director of policy and land use at the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, said Chestertown makes up 1% of Kent County’s land but accounts for more than one-quarter of the population and one-fifth of its wealth based on property values alone.
Scarcity plus increased demand has left many younger, longtime residents largely priced out.
Bailey lives in a three-bedroom home outside of the downtown neighborhood with his wife and two children. They would like to purchase a bigger home, Bailey said, but realistically cannot afford it given the market. The conveniences of living in town outweigh the desire for greater space out in the county, meaning he’s planning to stay put and make do.
Many others in that spot might leave the area altogether.
Kim Penny is in a similar squeeze. She’s a math teacher at the county’s only middle school, and works a second job as a server at The Retriever, a restaurant that sells both its version of a Big Mac and high-end liquor. She lives with her mom a few miles out of town in order to save money, and hopes to purchase a place of her own.
“Everything’s so expensive,” she said. Millennials like Penny who work in town tend to share the older, wealthier homeowners’ liberal politics. But they question whether they have a future in Kent County.
Tess Jones, a manager at an independent bookstore called The Bookplate on the town’s main drag, had until recently been living with her partner and their children in a rental her parents own. She and her partner scraped and just bought a house. At 35, Jones said her day-to-day finances and Chestertown’s cost of living doesn’t leave her with much of a cushion to build retirement savings.
She said Kent County’s younger residents who stay are doing so in spite of financial reasons to leave.
“You live here because you love it, you’re invested in the community. And then there are a lot of very, very wealthy older people who, honestly, pay the taxes,” Jones said. “It’s a hard balance.”
Like everywhere, Kent County’s politics don’t neatly break down as urban versus rural or wealthy versus working-class.
The county has voted fairly erratically in local races. The entire county commission is Republican — although commission President Ronald Fithian was a Democrat until 2020, when he felt the party had gone too far left and “left me behind” — and so is the sheriff. But the clerk of court and state’s attorney are both Democrats.
That has more to do with the intimate nature of a small place than a citizenry’s desire to have a bipartisan government at the local level, said Pat Nugent, a professor of history and politics at Washington College, a private liberal arts school in Chestertown that helps give the town its buzzy feel.
He said the “manufactured divisions” in state and national politics do not hold up at the hyperlocal level. At least not when a voter and an elected official are liable to run into each other at the post office or the grocery store with some regularity.
“It kind of forces people to be decent to one another, or it encourages people to be decent, generally speaking,” Nugent said.
Examples of the civility Nugent pointed to abound. Kent County Democratic Club President Bill Flook said the former Republican sheriff, now also a county commissioner, was one of the “more enlightened” sheriffs on the Eastern Shore, and that his replacement, another Republican named Dennis Hickman, is a “great guy.”
Not everyone is singing “Kumbaya.”
Paul Tue III is co-founder of the Black-led nonprofit Minary’s Dream Alliance, which plays a vital role for people of color in a county that is more than 80% white. Tue, who is Black, has lived in Kent County for 17 years and said local politics can be “very much good old boyish.”
“I don’t want to throw the politicians under the bus,” he said. “If you know how to access them, they’re more than accessible. But if you don’t, then I think it would be impossible for you to feel heard or represented.”
Working-class Black residents might not be able to name a single local official, Tue said, because it’s hard to get too involved in electoral politics when they’re “catching hell” trying to put food on the table or trying to make rent.
There has been some sense of progress, Tue said, at least compared to other Eastern Shore counties. Colleagues from across the Chester River have told Tue that they think Chestertown is the most progressive place east of the Bay.
“I didn’t feel this place was very progressive when I first got here, but you have people on the outside [of the county] looking in saying, ‘I wish I could do that in my community,” he said of Minary’s Dream Alliance.
Tue attributed the progressive turn in part to the wealthy people who move to town and want to get involved in local politics.
“They’ve gone out intentionally to form relationships with people who are not in their tax bracket,” he said. But he also feels the squeeze caused by their presence.
Political progressiveness does no good if people cannot find a way to balance the desire to preserve the charming small-town feel with a need for economic development and growth. This is often where Nickerson’s thoughts land.
On a drive through the countryside, he pointed to some of the county’s markers from his 55 years of living there. It was a nostalgia tour.
There’s the former dairy farm where he worked as a high school student. There’s the former general store in the town of Still Pond, which stopped being an actual town a long time ago. There’s the old country church, Still Pond United Methodist, where he and his wife got married, and there’s the graveyard where his ancestors’ headstones are the oldest in it.
Eventually, he turned onto Still Pond Neck Road, a short-ish country lane that dead-ends at the Chesapeake Bay. He and his wife own almost all the land to the left. He drove up a gravel path, toward his house, which dates to the 1700s and sits on a knoll. Follow the path farther and you come down to the backside of his property, through a stand of trees and into a clearing with a dilapidated cottage and a pier that juts into Still Pond Creek.
This is a place that won’t change, at least not for a while. With the help of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Nickerson obtained an easement that essentially preserves his farm as open space in perpetuity.
“If I have anything to do with it, for the next 1,000 years you will be able to come down here and see Still Pond Creek,” he said, beaming.
Nickerson can control that. For as long as he is in office — he’s in his second year of his first term — he also has a say in what happens to Kent County.
But how do you balance change and progress against the desire to hold onto what used to be? It’s a question that keeps him awake at night.
“I wish you had the answer for me,” Nickerson said. “I really do.”
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