Chris Phipps, chief engineer for the Public Works Department, had heard such questions and complaints before. He told Hantman and her neighbors that Anne Arundel County has a backlog of some $400 million dollars worth of repair work — to fix the pipes, ponds, and other devices that make up the area's stormwater infrastructure. He listened carefully and then suggested that while the county had no budget to undertake extensive repairs at present, he could support a study of their community's stormwater system. Hantman's felt encouraged. It seemed like a place to start.

She next contacted her county council representative to see if he could help — to support funding, for example, to actually repair the stormwater system. She also testified at council hearings, trying to draw more attention to the impact on her community and Beards Creek caused by development projects fringing her neighborhood.

Meanwhile development continued to arrive in a big way. For many years, a lone Giant food store marked the gateway to the neighborhood on the north side of Southdown Road, the main street leading into the neighborhood. A small bank stood on the other side, and south of the bank remained a stand of trees two blocks long. To the north, lay the last remaining farm fields in this area. Now their time had run out.

First one stand of trees fell to make way for a WaWa convenience store with gas pumps. Since construction plans called for runoff from the store and its parking lot to drain into the neighborhood's stormwater system, Hantman's community voiced its concern at a hearing before the county board of appeals. In the end, Hantman and her neighbors saw that the scale of the project remained essentially unchanged and felt their efforts had proven futile.

When the county finished its independent study of Hantman's community stormwater system in 2003, they reported that much of that system was failing. This confirmed Hantman's fear that new construction along Route 2 fed into a system already inadequate to keep stormwater from damaging the creek.

Hantman took this information to a county permit hearing, and questioned how new development could be allowed to tie into a stormwater system that the county itself labeled as failing. The answer confused her. County officials told her that projects like the new WaWa actually surpassed county requirements for stormwater management — they were, in fact, "overmanaging." Hantman asked exactly what that "overmanaging" meant, and was told that the convenience store would have large underground tanks that would catch the first flush of rainwater. But once the tanks filled, she understood, the stormwater would then empty into the community system.

No one seemed able to answer her question about how that would affect the community's stormwater system or the creek's water quality.

Then in 2004 a developer cleared land for a new subdivision adjacent to nearby Lee airport, and more silt found its way to the creek, more brown plumes wafted into the water. Soon after, another developer cleared what remained of the two-block stand of trees along the neighborhood's eastern edge to make way for a four-story apartment building. Change had clearly come to Hantman's little piece of Bay country.

What they don't know is exactly to what degree this is happening in their creek, and to what extent the development that has exploded in their Edgewater community has caused any ecological damage. Most of all, they don't know what to do about it.

Hantman trudged through the mud of the apartment construction site, along with two other representatives from her community. They followed the site manager as he pointed out stormwater devices and described their environmental protection measures. Although the company diligently graded the lot and installed silt fences, rainfall soon sent another brown plume down storm drains and into Beards Creek.

Something seemed wrong, and Hantman still questioned how permits could allow construction projects to tie into failing systems.

She decided to take her question to the next level, to the agency charged with keeping pollution out of the state's waterways, the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). There she found some very helpful information, and another twist in the bureaucratic maze.

Ken Pensyl, the administrator of MDE's Sediment, Stormwater and Dam Safety Program, like Hantman, takes the environment very seriously. Pensyl informed her that Maryland has a comprehensive stormwater management manual, and tries to maintain "as near as possible" the same runoff characteristics as before land is developed. He assured her that state stormwater rules are in place to reduce stream channel erosion, pollution, sedimentation, and local flooding. The state, he says, also requires local governments to include inspection and maintenance of stormwater practices, which can include specific maintenance agreements, with homeowners associations, for example. Hantman said that she had heard from a number of experts that Maryland's stormwater provisions serve as something of a model for the nation.

But what Pensyl told her next plumbed the heart of the matter. He said that actual decisions on the ground occur at the county level, through local zoning and permitting, and through local enforcement of construction practices.

Hantman found herself right back where she started — at the county level. Like someone lost in the woods who begins to recognize the same trees, she felt that she had come full circle.

Undeterred, she ratcheted the process up a notch, writing a formal complaint to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and copying both of Maryland's U.S. senators and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. She did this in her capacity as community association secretary — and because there must be, she felt, some way to step out of this endless cycle. It was now 2005, four years after her move to Beards Creek.

The EPA is the agency charged with enforcing the federal Clean Water Act, first passed by Congress in 1972. That law calls for the nation's waters to become fishable and swimmable, depending on their designated uses. A primary role of the EPA is to enforce limits on contaminants, including sediment and nutrients, that flow into the nation's waterways, so-called total maximum daily loads (TMDLs). The EPA keeps watch over stormwater management and can penalize states for not meeting the requirements of the Clean Water Act, but Hantman learned that the states have considerable latitude in precisely how they decide to manage stormwater.

The federal government depends on the states. The states depend on the counties. The counties depend on local input. Hantman saw that she would have to become part of that local input.

At hearings and in discussions with government agencies and even develop-ers, Hantman met a barrage of technical information. Runoff coefficients. Sheet flow. Predevelopment rates. If she were going to speak this language she needed to climb the learning curve. She signed up for an urban runoff symposium organized by Allen Davis, director of the University of Maryland Water Resources Research Center. An engineer, Davis is a leading researcher in the relatively new field of bioretention — designing ways to restore natural buffering capacity to highly developed landscapes. (See "Bend in the River".)

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