Plan to dredge Hart-Miller Island moving forward

First published Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024 in the Dundalk Eagle.

Despite some community opposition, the plan to put dredged material from the bottom of Tradepoint Atlantic’s harbor on Hart-Miller Island seems to be moving full steam ahead.

On Monday, at a meeting of the Hart-Miller Island Community Benefit Agreement Steering Committee, the conversation seemed to have turned from whether to place material dredged from the bottom of Tradepoint’s harbor on Hart-Miller Island to how and under what conditions to place it there.

Aaron Tomarchio, Tradepoint’s executive vice president for corporate affairs, said the company feels that moving ahead with placing the dredge on the island, which is also a Maryland state park, is the best option because it uses an existing site. The alternative would be to build a new containment site, which is much more expensive and have a greater impact on the community.

“100 acres of open water versus utilizing an existing facility,” Tomarchio said. “That’s the dynamics.”

Tradepoint proposed paying the community about $40 million in exchange for letting it deposit the material on the island — known as a community benefits agreement.

Tradepoint would also pay a fee per cubic yard of material deposited on the north side of the island — estimated to be about $50 million for roughly four million cubic yards of dredged material.

Those costs are in addition to construction costs, liability costs and many more — estimated to be over $1 billion.

Only dredged material deemed safe enough for the island would be placed there, Tradepoint emphasized. Any material that contains toxins above the government-set threshold would be placed in other sites.

Community opposition, too, softened at the committee meeting with about 20 people in attendance besides the committee members at Kenwood High School. Two representatives from the Baltimore Bird Club, Joe Corcoran and Kathy Lambrow, at first told the committee to reject the community benefits agreement altogether. After some negotiating, they seemed to settle on setting aside 100 acres of the island’s area used for this round of dredging for the birds found on the island.

Russell S. Donnelly, a community environmental activist, warned of setting a bad precedent.

“This will be the first time that a state or a federal park has ever been used for the deposition of third-party industrial waste,” he said. “That’s a big issue.”

In the end, few things were decided at the meeting. Big issues like how much money Tradepoint Atlantic should pay the community got tabled. Only three resolutions passed, one that empowers the Hart-Miller Island Citizens Oversight Commission to oversee part of the fund, one that establishes two groups for County Council District 5 and District 7 to oversee the rest of the money, and one that suggests three phases in which Tradepoint will pay out the money in the Community Benefits Agreement.

Ultimately, though, the decision on whether to let Tradepoint Atlantic place the dredged material on Hart-Miller Island lies with the Baltimore County Council, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski and environmental regulatory authorities. The steering committee can only recommend the county go ahead — or not — with the plan.

Still, Tomarchio, the Tradepoint Atlantic executive, cautioned that the community shouldn’t let the opportunity slip by in an interview after the meeting. Demands that the company pay more in its Community Benefits Agreement could kill the plan because investors like Mediterranean Shipping Company — the largest shipping company in the world according to a Baltimore County press release — could jump ship, he added.

“And that means we lose a billion-dollar container terminal. We lose the world’s largest shipper, to make Maryland, to make Baltimore the third busiest port, the third largest port on the East Coast of the United States,” he said. “And we lose all of the economic activity that would be derived from it. Baltimore remains a backwater port.”