Published October 3, 2008
In July of 2008, SustainLane spoke with several officials and employees of the city of Baltimore, including: Tom Stosur, Assistant Deputy Mayor; Karen Miller, Communications Officer for Mayor Sheila Dixon; Beth Strommen, Manager of the Office of Sustainability; Ted Atwood of the Energy Department; Duncan Stewart, Environmental Planner in the Office of Sustainability; and Sarah Zaleski, Sustainability Coordinator. Baltimore officials told us that the city has the opportunity to lead other municipalities like it—former industrial cities that are poor and middle-sized. Located on Chesapeake Bay, the city is currently revising its flood plain mapping in preparation for the potential impact of a rise in sea level.
Read the full Q&A below:
SustainLane: How did the city of Baltimore develop?
Stosur: We started as a port city. As I understand it, we had a locational advantage because we were way at the western end of the Chesapeake Bay, so ships could come further inland. And then we were a natural hub for railroading and all that kind of stuff. That didn’t turn into so much of an advantage as the decades and centuries wore on, but early on that was the pretty key reason for why we were an important port city and why we were one of the top five cities in population in the early 1800s.
As far as development goes, I think there were three original settlements in Baltimore, in Jonestown and Fells Point. . . and eventually waves of development spread out from that central core.
Strommen: I like to say we are who we are because of Baltimore’s geography. We sit right in the middle of where two geographic or physiographic regions cross. It’s the Piedmont plateau and the coastal plain. Basically, at that point, it’s a very steep fall, and all of our stream valleys can be very steep. So, combined with the fact that we have the sea port, at one point we had more mills than I think any other city in the east coast. We were basically producing. It’s why we became an industrial center.
The water between our stream valleys flows so fast and furiously, that it was very economical to use those streams for power in the form of mill. The mills are basically what produced the grain, which they later ground into flour. They [produced] cotton and sail cloth. You name it, and they were producing it. [Then] we stopped using the water for power and started using it to dump our waste.
SustainLane: What are some of the challenges Baltimore faces because of the geographical location?
Zaleski: One of the things that captures a lot of interest is the health of the Chesapeake Bay, and because our tourism industry, and even fishing stations suffer and rely so heavily upon it. It’s a challenge and an opportunity. The Chesapeake bay is quite huge and Baltimore city is one of the major cities on the bay. There is a multi-state agreement called the Chesapeake Bay Agreement. Every [state] has. . .agreed to do water quality improvements that reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, sediments into their water systems. Because what’s happening was all these populated areas were contributing these nutrients to the bay and it was being overwhelmed, and we had lot of water quality problems. It is inappropriate to try to blame one when everybody is contributing; housing development is guilty, farmers are guilty, you name it; its all contributing, large deforestation is contributing.
Stosur: It may be less an industrial problem than it is development and polluted runoff and agricultural uses putting in the nutrients that degrade the bay quality and the gases and the oxygen and all that stuff.
That is seen as one of the greatest ongoing challenges for our entire multi-state region, improving the health of the Chesapeake bay; of course now with climate change and everything going on with greenhouse gases just add to the complexity of what we need to deal with.
Stosur: Also, the air quality because we have a kind of a basin here that gets stagnant. We don’t have lot of air flow. We get a lot of stagnant air in the summer and build up in ozone and the high pollution periods.
Another challenge is that here is a city right on the tip of the bay, and there is potential impact as the sea level rise could hit us. We are starting do some planning for that as well, like revising our entire flood plain mapping.
SustainLane: Baltimore ranks 28th in our survey for natural disaster risk. What natural disasters does the city face?
Stosur: Severe hurricanes. We get the effects of the huge rain storms or swells of tidal waters washing over; the last one was about [five] years ago [Hurricane Isabel].
Zaleski: It really was flooding, because the hurricanes rarely come up the Chesapeake Bay.
It actually was a combination of the location of the hurricane and its wind pattern that drove up the high tide to severe levels. It wasn’t rainfall actually flooding down the stream valley; it was actually a pre-practice severe global warming scenario, where, much to everyone’s surprise, bay water rose a little over eight feet.
What that did was actually put us on notice—we now have to account for these severe rises during storm events. It basically means it either met or exceeded our predictions on that; now we are revisiting our predictions. We are choosing to use that to modify how we do things, take that into account so that we are better prepared. We are working with the state. We are using the Isabel experience and then to get better factual data, we have to work with the state and actually look at the numbers; they have to do modeling
SustainLane: Are there other built-in limitations for Baltimore when it comes to sustainability?
Zaleski: Because we are a smaller city, [one limitation] is finances and things of that nature.
Right now we have a lack of control in Baltimore for our public transportation systems. We don’t run it; it is run by the state of Maryland. In other parts of the state-- in other parts of the country, the local government may have their own board that makes recommendations to the state. But here in Baltimore we really don’t (have a jurisdictional partnership). We would like to improve that situation; we’d like to have more say in it. I am not pin pointing any specific projects. We are moving very well with the state in a lot of the planning; it is really the operations and how they run on a day-to-day basis that we may want to work with them.
SustainLane: What are some other built-in challenges aside from transit?
Zaleski: A unique challenge for any rustbelt city is the brown field issue. In order to redevelop sites and bring people into the city, you almost always have some sort of pre-existing condition you have to work with. It might be some level of contamination from a previous industrial facility that was there, or even older buildings. Because we want to preserve the character of Baltimore, we have to look at ways to green existing buildings, and it is often more expensive and more challenging to work with an existing structure than it is just to build new.
Stosur: This challenge isn’t the necessarily the result of geography. It is more kind of the nexus of geography and politics: We have a very fixed city boundary of 85 square miles, and at one time we are close to a million people within those 85 square miles back in about 1955 or so; now the metro area has exploded to over 2.5 million residents. But within our 85 square mile boundary, we now have about 640,000 people. Capturing more of the regions population and fighting suburban sprawl is basically one of the biggest ongoing challenges I think to overall sustainability in the region. [And this affects] air quality, and quality of life and amount of resources available for investments and everything else.
SustainLane: How are you doing with sprawl-management?
Zaleski: Baltimore is very unique in the sense that there is very clear delineation between the city and the county, and we are not contained by the county as many cities are. The sprawl within Baltimore City is not an issue.
Stosur: But with the regional sprawl—a lot of cities in the west are able to annex the new development and get it as a part of its tax base. We are unable to do that. We have a fixed boundary, and we don’t have any control directly and often indirectly, over what the surrounding counties do. They are able to grow some what willy-nilly and take advantage. I think we are getting better at regional cooperation, but it is just the ongoing reality; we used to be the power house of the state politically, economically, population wise and everything and we still are very powerful in the state; but because we lost population and others have dramatically increased it, they have much higher political representation now in the General Assembly, so it makes it much more difficult for us to pursue our agenda at the state level.
Stewart: One of the things here that is very odd from the standpoint of sustainability and sprawl is that we have seen our population start to turn around and rise in the past fifteen years. We are the [one of the top] wealthiest significant downtown populations in the country. Clearly because of our harbor. We could probably house our entire population in high rise condominiums with waterfront views.
In our downtown area, back when there was this large population, there were few people that lived in the heart of downtown. Many of our office buildings are now condominiums; and many more new condominiums are being built downtown, and apartments than office buildings. We have the mass transit of the rail system between us and Washington DC, and there are a lot of people coming out of DC and living here. They come here because they can get on the train and get to DC faster than they can in the car, and cheaper. And when there is bad weather, the trains are quicker than everything else. We have attracted a lot of residents in our downtown area. We are kind of an example [people returning to the city’s downtown] for the positive reasons.
Stosur: We have seen a substantial turn around in the city with attracting residents, businesses, a lot more retail coming downtown now to service that population. It's pretty significant compared to what it was even 6 or 7 years ago, and I think we’re poised to really blossom as an urban center particularly with fuel and gas prices going up so high.
SustainLane: What are some other changes that Baltimore is making to become more sustainable?
Strommen: We have a green building requirement that passed last August, that went into effect on July 1st of this year. All new developments over 10,000 square feet in the city have to be LEED silver or the equivalent—somewhat similar to what Chicago has.
We have also gone to single stream recycling, and I think we have got 30 percent increase. It’s so popular that when we went to sell the recycling bin, we sold out and there was almost a riot.
Miller: Also, the mayor passed an ordinance [in August of 2007] creating a sustainability commission. This isn’t a task force or committee. It’s actually a commission on the same level as our planning commission or that type of structure. We have a four-year term, and they are charged with creating a sustainability plan for the city of Baltimore and to oversee or assist with the implementation of that plan.
Stosur: We also established the city’s office of sustainability in the planning department. Beth is the manager of the office and Sarah is the coordinator for the office. This is brand new as well.
Strommen: The mayor believed that the City of Baltimore should be leading by example, and she created an environmental sub-cabinet. This is an organization made up of all of cabinet level positions in the city, chaired by Mr. Stosur. Its role is to coordinate city agencies. Each agency will have its own sustainability program.
The three-pronged environmental sub-cabinet for the internal operations of the city that sustainability commission set community wide standards and initiatives and the office of sustainability staff those.
Strommen: Let me add one more thing – the rezoning that deals with land use and transit oriented development. We are doing a comprehensive overhaul of the city’s zoning to kind of more sustainable blend. We’re calling it, “Transform Baltimore.” Hopefully, through comprehensive rezoning, the whole city will be a bit more updated and generally integrate more elements of sustainability in terms of how we use our land.
Miller: The zoning code was last updated in 1971. Since we are already doing the sustainability plan, at the same time, we can deal with the two of them in unison and working together.
SustainLane: What changes are being made to the public transportation system?
Stosur: We are aggressively pursuing an expansion of our transit line, our subway and metro lines, in a partnership with the state. We are promoting Baltimore as the place to expand, and become the number one priority for the state. But in our situation we are also directly competing with the Maryland, D.C. suburbs who are also looking to expand their transit. And we are both going for the same limited pot of federal dollars to get this project off the ground.
Miller: We are proposing new light rail systems. We are working with them now in the planning, and hopefully we’ll get approval from the federal government for funding to greatly expand our rails.
We just initiated a new downtown shuttle and we are also working on. . . an old-fashioned trolley system that will run up and down Charles street, connecting some of those tourist destinations that are a little bit out of reach. In addition, it will serve some of our major universities.
SustainLane: What about other alternative transportation options, like bicycling?
Miller: We have a bicycle master plan that’s been adopted and we have invested [initially] nearly two million dollars just to get off the ground. We went from zero to, I’d say probably up to at least 60 miles of bikeways, just in the past two years. Bike racks are on all the MTA buses, and we have a full time bicycle coordinator in the Department of Transportation.
Stosur: Our Mayor is a huge cycling enthusiast. She hosts a bike ride every Friday morning at 6:15 A.M. that starts from City Hall and anyone and everyone are welcome to join her on these Friday morning jogs through all sorts of different city neighborhoods; and that’s really brought a lot more exposure to the existing and growing bicycle network we have.
Miller: I would say if we build it they will come. [We] are putting in the lanes and the markings to encourage people who normally don’t ride to considering riding, because they actually feel safer. By just putting in new markings, we have seen an increase in ridership.
The bike racks that are there at our train station are always full. I doubled the number of bike racks two years ago, and I got complaints the next day, they are full again. I don’t know where these people came from but I guess they were parking on the street or something.
Stosur: Biking and simply walking, as we have more people living downtown and in downtown areas. We have a lot more options simply to walk to work or where you need to go. With the retail establishments there are places downtown now for people to actually shop for their groceries, and clothing, and electronics and everything else, five years ago that wasn’t the case.
We have a car-sharing program coming up in the next three or four month. That will give folks yet another alternative transportation option.
SustainLane: How does Baltimore plan to increase renewable energy usage and or cut existing electricity usage?
Atwood: The state has enacted a law to reduce our electric demand by 15 percent by 2015, and I think that the city has a very good shot of doing that and maybe exceeding that, just looking at what can be done in energy efficiencies. Just putting in [CFL] light bulbs and more energy-efficient appliances and more consciousness about turning your lights off. In an everyday household, we can reduce our energy usage by 20 percent.
We have a lot of power right now. . . coming from waste. We are capturing our landfill gas for making power, and we are capturing gas from our wastewater treatment plant. We are now exploring the options for solar.
One of the big drivers for solar business is the 30 percent tax credit from the federal government, which expires by the end of this year. It hasn’t been renewed yet. But we now in the process of identifying candidate sites and working with some solar companies, to jointly identify our schools, some of our landfill areas, some other in-ground sites, and some of our buildings [as potential solar power sites].
By 2020, it is conceivable to supply 20% of our city from renewable energy from the waste utilization, from solar and from geothermal.
SustainLane: What are the biggest challenges for Baltimore over the next 50 years?
Stosur: One of the ongoing challenges is keeping crime down. We are making a lot of headway with that now, and it's in the best shape that has been in 20 years.
I think our property tax rates are a big challenge for us. We have a high rate, and we put together a pretty aggressive set of recommendations to try and tackle it, but there are lot of tough choices to be made there. . . Those are the big ones on my list.
Miller: It’s increasing the population. We are in competition not only with other cities, but with surrounding regions and up until ten years ago, the population had been dropping for many, many years. It’s increasing now, but again continuing that rise and maintaining the diversity and type of people that live here is a good challenge. We want to be focusing on that as well as everything else Tom mentioned.
Stosur: We were kind of slow here to realize what we had in resources, and we are kind of waking up to those challenges. Now that we have a lot of good resources, it’s putting them to use. We have got a lot in the way of resources that are attracting new businesses to do economic development here, and we are changing from being talked about as an industrial city to being talked about more in the medical field, life sciences and physical sciences.
SustainLane: If Baltimore could become a global leader in an area of sustainability, what would it be?
Stosur: I think what Baltimore could do best is show all the other cities like it—middle-sized, poor, former industrial cities, not to give up. That it can be done, and you can do it, and you can do just as much as San Francisco and others that already had these big starts, because of their wealth and the like-minded community. I think that the biggest message that we can send is to all the other cities that are five, six, seven hundred thousand in population, former industrial cities, that it’s not a hopeless thing and it can be done.
SustainLane: You think Baltimore can be a leader of former industrial cities?
Miller: Absolutely, the middle sized former industrial cities. There are a lot of cities that are roughly our size that have the same background that we do. We don’t have the advantages of some of the cities like San Francisco, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. It means you look at different approaches. That’s why we are doing the plan the way we are doing; we want to be the first city where everybody thinks sustainably, not just certain categories of people.
SustainLane: We have talked with five or six different cities at this point, and it’s really interesting to note the different moods and energy around the issue of sustainability. It sounds like all of you are very optimistic and enthusiastic about what’s going on. Where does that optimism come from?
Stosur: I think a key part of that is leadership. Mayor Dixon has come out from the very beginning when she took office, with an agenda of a cleaner, greener, healthier, and safer city; some very basic tenets. . . and she is very out in front, and wanting this commission to take charge and be proactive.
SustainLane: How deep would you say that the feeling runs among Baltimoreans? Does the green optimism reach lower-income families?
Miller: That’s the reason why we are so upbeat. We are battling that up front. It’s not that people of color or people of a lower income and different races are not into, or understand, or care about sustainability. It’s how we talk about it. So we don’t approach it from “we know better” or “this is what it is.” We are actually asking people, “What is it?”
Stosur: “What does it mean to you, what does the government need to do to help, support, and make it better for you and your lives?”
Miller: The idea is that when people are actually part of society, [both the issue and the solution] belong to them. We don’t have to worry about trying to convince them to come around to your concepts; we develop concepts together. That probably is one of the reasons may be we are a little bit more upbeat, because that’s where we are getting such positive feedback, because we are letting people actually work with us.
Stosur: They are educating us as much as we are helping educate them on what topics are relevant and meaningful.
Photo Caption: Cheryl Casciani, Beth Strommen, and Sarah Zaleski; Baltimore Sustainability Commission members. (Photo courtesy Chris Myers/ Baltimore City Paper)
