A lesson in the real world of sustaining our life

   Governor Martin O'Malley's proposal to limit septic systems is bad news for the core of the new board of commissioners, and even more so for the land speculators, developers, real estate swappers and money baggers behind their recent sweep to victory.
    On the surface, it's a direct challenge to the "property rights" attitude that defines the current board, in contrast, say, to the philosophy of planning and preserving the resources of two previous boards.
    In case you were watching Dancing With the Stars or something, Maryland's governor spiced up an otherwise mundane State of the State address with the suggestion that the only way to meet the goals of cleaning up ground water in general and the Chesapeake Bay in particular was to put a limit on how many holes are punched into the Maryland countryside to receive the waste materials of residential neighborhoods. It's time, he said, to do what they have been trying to do for some time, and that is to put new home construction where there is already water and sewerage infrastructure in place to make the inflow and outgo more efficient -- and clean up our act.
     This is Smart Growth, which Republicans and other entrepreneurial types like to disparage as social engineering. It has never had much support from the people with money to make on residential growth in Carroll County, which is why this is GOP land, better known in the Baltimore Metro and DC suburban counties as Fortress Carroll. Folks out here favor the cowboy way of doing things, and they don't cotton much to the city folks with all their gov'mint regulations. It's why the Delegation to Annapolis is always Right on the money, but wrong in getting much done.
     When the 2002 Board of Commissioners, of which I was a member, came into office on a tide of sentiment for more growth control, the county still voted for Bob Ehrlich for governor and that good ol' bunch as the Carroll Delegation, but even the Republican governor and the GOP standard-carriers in the Senate and House could not overcome the general continuation of a more responsible way of planning and managing residential growth. The state Department of Planning, even under a Republican administration, still had to comply with federal pressures to clean up ground water and the runoff into the tributaries of the bay. The state Department of the Environment, under which the health department operates, still had stringent requirements for water quality coming out of county or municipal treatment plants, and even Bobby E, governor beloved of the Righteous Right, was maligned for imposing a "flush tax" that included even houses that flushed into an out of sight hole in the back yards.
     To his credit, Ehrlich was a realist about the need to address the problems of water and sewage in a growing population. We are not Wyoming; we are East Coast megalopolis, increasingly the bedroom of Baltimore-Washington.  An outpost, perhaps, but not a fortress.
     So for all the rants about the United Nations and the overreaching grasp of government, the fact to be dealt with is that the whole part and parcel of the region, including Carroll County, and even Washington and Garrett Counties, even the Eastern Shore, has to learn to be a regional neighbor, neighbors to each other, and it would be nice if we did not expect others to swim in or drink our effluent.
     Besides, the United States Government, even under Republican administrations, has come to realize that sustainability -- making sure that we can continue (sustain our life, even if it means adjusting our way of living).
     Don't blame it on the UN; this is our own nest that wise minds know we cannot continue to defile.