They say when it rains, it pours. In Baltimore, when it rains, shit pours— human shit from the city’s sewers pours into the Chesapeake Bay, into the street, and into people’s homes. 

These basement backups—shit streaming into people’s homes—will be the subject of an investigative hearing today to help residents deal with sewage the city’s programs aren’t doing much to currently help.

Baltimore’s decades-old sewage system was designed to allow excess raw sewage to flow directly into city streams and the Chesapeake Bay. In 2018 alone, rainfall washed 260 million gallons of wastewater into the Inner Harbor.  

Baltimore City is also currently under a federal consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland’s Department of the Environment to reduce these polluting sewage overflows into streams and the harbor. As officials work to close sewage outflow points into waterways and adhere to the consent decree, excess sewage flows out of drain pipes and into city residents’ homes. And these sewage backups can expose residents to bacteria, viruses, and parasites, which can cause infections. And they’re not just unhealthy and gross—they can also be costly, damaging floors, walls, furniture, and appliances such as washing machines.

In April 2018, the Department of Public Works (DPW) created an Expedited Reimbursement Program for residents experiencing sewage backups—a mandate under the consent decree. Yet according to environmental advocates with Clean Water Action, Blue Water Baltimore, and the Environmental Integrity Project who have reviewed DPW’s reports, the reimbursement program is seriously flawed. 

According to their analysis, of the 4,632 reported building backups from April 2018 to March 2019, the city only processed 74 applications for the program. Of the 74 processed, only 10 applications were accepted. The consent decree required that the city set aside $2 million per year for the reimbursement program, but they only doled out $14,775. 

So on Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 5 p.m., Baltimore’s City Council will hold an investigative hearing to assess the Expedited Reimbursement Program, and explore what else the city could do to help mitigate and prevent sewage backups.  Environmental and public health advocates will hold a press conference beforehand at 4 p.m.

Jennifer Kunze, an organizer with Clean Water Action discussed many of the problems with the current program with the Real News Network.

“From the beginning, [the Expedited Reimbursement Program] had a lot of shortcomings,” Kunze said.

One shortcoming was the amount of money the program offered.

 “It was capped at a reimbursement of $2,500 which is not adequate to how much these incidents can really cost people,” Kunze said. “It only covers cleanup costs, not property loss, which is where the big damages can really rack up, especially if sewage floods into someone’s hot water heater or furnace.” 

Kunze also says the program should apply to a broader range of backups: “It only covers sewer backup that are caused by wet weather events—rain water getting in through cracks and holes in the sewer system and flooding things, flooding the pipes, forcing the sewage to back up.” 

Heavy rains aren’t the only things that can cause backups, Kunze said: “If someone has a really terrible sewage backup that’s caused by a fatberg [editor’s note: a fatberg is a mass of improperly flushed materials held together by cooking grease and other fatty products which can clog pipes], a clog down in the city sewage line, the main line under their street, or even from contractor error of someone who’s working on the sewage lines…that wouldn’t be eligible for reimbursement.”

Often, multiple factors work together to create backups. A clogged pipe, for instance, may only pose problems during a rainstorm. 

“Both of those two things together are going to interact with each other and make a sewage backup that might’ve been minor if there was wet weather surcharging going through a perfectly clean pipe, turn into a major problem,” said Kunze. “And so to make this determination that if there’s a clog in the pipe, wet weather didn’t contribute and someone shouldn’t be able to get help from the city that they need is not an equitable way to make that decision.” 

DPW has not made public how they determine whether or not a backup was caused by a “wet weather event” or heavy rainfall.

Another factor that can exacerbate these backups: The climate crisis. 2018 was Baltimore’s wettest year on record, and more rain puts more stress on the city’s pipes, creating more sewage backups. 

“It’s only right that a responsible amount of that money is going back to help people who are experiencing this really, really awful problem in their homes,” Kunze said. “And I mean, people’s water bills are going up.” 

The repairs and replacements the city is mandated to undertake under the federal consent decree will eventually cost city ratepayers $2 billion. To raise this revenue, the city has imposed a series of water and sewage rate hikes. This year, the price of water increased by 10%, and two more 10% rate hikes are planned over the next two years. Even before the latest increase, water rates had doubled since 2012. These rate hikes have prompted calls to implement an income-based water billing system.

Kunze says there are several ways to improve the existing reimbursement program which she hopes officials will address. “Reimbursement should not be capped at $2,500, as that does not reflect the cost of one of these incidents,” she said. “Reimbursements should not only be for clean-up costs, also for property damage, and you should be able to get reimbursement for an incident that’s caused by problems in the city side of the sewer line, whether that’s wet weather or a fatberg or anything else that isn’t on your property and your own responsibility,” she said. 

She hopes the discussion doesn’t stop there. 

“More broadly, I think that we should really be looking to cities like Cincinnati, Ohio that have been more proactively dealing with this through a public health lens,” she said. “In Cincinnati…when you call to report that there is sewage in your basement, the city will send someone out within four hours and then provides a cleanup crew that is able to handle this hazmat situation in your home and then clean it up for you.”

Wednesday’s hearing will give city officials an opportunity to sort this shit out.

“We need to make sure that we are prioritizing stopping sewage backups from happening because of their really enormous public health impacts that they have on Baltimore City residents and the financial impacts,” Kunze said. 

The post Baltimore Reckons With A Shitty Sewage Situation appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

City Council advanced a bill on Monday that will drastically reform Baltimore’s water billing system, and advocates are elated.

“To deny citizens the ability to have affordable water is to deny them access to a basic human right,” said councilperson Sharon Green Middleton. “People in our communities have been suffering and worrying about their water bills for way too long.”

At Monday’s hearing, City Council approved the Water Accountability and Equity Act (Council Bill 180307) which would discount customers’ water rates based on their income. Residents who make 50 percent of the poverty limit would be required to spend no more than 1 percent of their income on water. Residents who make 100 to 200 percent of the poverty level would have their bills capped at three percent of their income.

The bill would also create an office to hear disputes about erroneous bills, and expand the city’s definition of a water customer to allow renters to manage their own water accounts. Currently, renters are only eligible for water bill assistance if their landlords agree to add their names to a property’s account. The legislation will move to a final vote on Nov. 4. If it passes there, it will go to Young’s desk for final approval, where it is expected to pass.

Mayor Jack Young—who announced this weekend that he is running for re-election—introduced the bill in December 2018 when he was City Council president.

Previously, the Department of Public Works (DPW) attempted to gut the bill, but a spokesperson from the department told the Baltimore Sun that they no longer oppose its passage. Middleton said the coalition’s and council’s tenacity made it difficult for DPW to keep opposing the bill: “I think they saw that the advocacy groups, the [Taxation and Finance] Committee, the council president’s office, none of us would back down. And they saw that we had lots of data. So having all that together and being organized helped them to understand we weren’t gonna let them keep procrastinating on the bill.”

Water affordability advocates said that since they began working with Young on the bill in summer 2017, getting the DPW on board was their biggest challenge.

“We delayed the introduction over a year just trying to get their input on the bill,” Rianna Eckel, an organizer with Food and Water Action and convener of the Right to Water Coalition, said.

In July, DPW attended a meeting in the City Council’s Taxation and Finance Committee on the bill without written amendments to show. Then last month, DPW proposed a suite of amendments which would have gutted the bill. They said the legislation would be incompatible with the current billing system because it would require up-front discounts instead of reimbursements, and require the department to change the definition of a water customer to include renters.

“Essentially, they took away the entire bill and substituted their business as usual policies, which we know are not working for the people of Baltimore,” Eckel said.

DPW director Rudy Chow said that the department was committed to making bills more affordable for low-income residents, as evidenced by their progress implementing their new Baltimore H2O Assists and H2O Assists Plus programs: “I’m not saying the system we have in place is the best, and it should never got modified or changed,” Chow said at a September hearing on the bill. “As I’ve said before, we’ll continue to adjust that program.”

Last week, Chow announced that he plans to retire in February.

Eckel said DPW’s new programs are insufficient because they offer a flat percentage discount on bills, rather than tying bills to customers’ incomes: “With this flat discount, some families may still be unable to afford their bills, especially as rates are set to rise.” Eckel added that income-based billing is the only method that responds to low-income Baltimoreans’ needs—“his legislation is long overdue for the people of Baltimore, and it’s been a long journey to pass it.”

Advocates say the bill is especially necessary because city water bills are rising. This year, the city increased the price of water by 10 percent, and they plan to increase it by another 20 percent over the next two years. Even before the latest increase, rates had doubled since 2012. Officials say the increases are necessary to repair Baltimore’s aging water and sewer infrastructure.

Baltimore also has a problem of incorrect bills. In 2016, hundreds of residents received bills of over $50,000 each and last week, Mayor Young’s office announced they will conduct a sweeping audit of the city’s water billing system after WBAL reported that the city did not collect any water bills from the waterfront Ritz Carlton Residences for over a decade. The condominium complex owes around 2.3 million dollars.

Councilmembers did approve some amendments to the bill.

One proposed by the Law Department would make the new customer advocate office a part of DPW instead of a separate entity. “You can put language in to say DPW can’t touch them,” said Law Department Attorney Hillary Ruley at a July hearing on the bill. “But it’s a crime under Maryland law to look at other people’s information.”

Bill advocates would have preferred the office to be completely independent from DPW, but realized that would have required amending the city’s charter. The Council also approved an amendment from the Department of Finance, which would remove a provision that would have lowered the interest rate on tax sales for owner-occupied properties to five percent.

“Of course, we’re sad to see it removed, but because water bills are now removed from tax sale, it will no longer determine a family’s access to water,” Eckel said, referring to a bill that Maryland’s General Assembly passed last year which disables the city from seizing residents’ homes and putting them up for tax sale due to unpaid water bills.

Councilperson Ryan Dorsey also proposed an amendment that would require the city to begin researching another reform, which would require residents with larger properties to pay higher infrastructure bills.

“This legislation is about structural change,” said Council President Brandon Scott. “I’m proud that the Water Affordability and Equity Act is back before the full council. We know it was a tough process.”

At Monday’s hearing, City Council also passed a resolution to reopen and renegotiate the Baltimore’s Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement, which allows large nonprofit institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Hospital to make yearly payments to the city instead of being taxed a percentage.

“The big relationship between the Water Accountability and Equity Act and the PILOT program is that by [major nonprofit institutions] paying so low in their tax rate, it causes the cost of public services to be raised,” said Morgan State University professor of public health and activist Dr. Lawrence Brown.

Brown said that if all institutions were required to pay more, city residents could see untold benefits.

“We could have affordable housing that’s produced in this city. We could have a universal basic income that supports that the folks that are on the corners cleaning windshields. We could have universal healthcare in this city,” he said at a press conference before the hearing.

“We could have affordable water, too,” Brown added in an interview with the Real News though he stressed the water affordability legislation could have been stronger: “The Water for All program should be automatically applied for entire [low-income] neighborhoods. People shouldn’t have to sign up,” Brown said. “But we definitely should be looking for ways to make taxes and the general fund and the spending we do in this city more equitable.

Though advocates were delighted that the bill advanced, recent news cast a long shadow over the hearing: Longtime DPW spokesman Jeffery Raymond died on Sunday.

“The entire Department of Public Works extends our sincere and heartfelt condolences to Mr. Raymond’s family,” DPW’s Chow said in a statement, which councilperson Mary Pat Clarke read at the hearing. Despite the sad news of Raymond’s passing, as well as the recent losses of Michigan representative John Conyers, Maryland representative Elijah Cummings, and Former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, Middleton said supporters should remember to celebrate the bill advancing.

“It’s going to be a bright day in Baltimore,” said Councilwoman Middleton.

The post Baltimore is one step closer to income-based water billing appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

City officials are trying to hold big energy companies accountable for fueling the climate crisis—Baltimore just had it’s hottest October day ever by the way—and the energy companies are pushing back by appealing to the Supreme Court.

Last year, Baltimore sued 26 major oil and gas companies, alleging that they knowingly contributed to climate change. On Tuesday, the 26 companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to stop the suit from proceeding in state court, pending an appeal to the U.S. Fourth District Court. 

City officials filed the suit in August 2018. “The aim here is to seek compensation to the city from the consequences of climate change,” City Solicitor Andre Davis, who brought the case, told the Real News Network last year. “The fossil fuel companies have known for decades of the catastrophic consequences of their market approach, their business model, and we don’t believe it’s fair or equitable for the taxpayers of Baltimore City to incur and bear all the costs that will be consequences of their business model.”

Davis filed the suit in state court, but the companies argue that it should be heard at the federal level.

“It is difficult to imagine claims that more clearly implicate substantial questions of federal law and require uniform disposition than the claims at issue here, which seek to transform the nation’s energy, environmental, national security, and foreign policies by punishing energy companies for lawfully supplying necessary oil and gas resources,” says the companies’ appeal to the Supreme Court. “This Court has long held that lawsuits like this one targeting interstate pollution and related issues necessarily implicate uniquely federal interests and should be resolved under federal common law, not state law.”

In June, Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander rejected the companies’ argument, sending the case back to state court. But the energy giants appealed that decision to the ruling to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it’s still being considered. 

On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit ruled against issuing a stay in the case in the lower courts. That decision would have allowed city officials to begin the discovery process, which would compel the companies to turn over evidence supporting the state case, including documents showing their knowledge of the catastrophic climate impacts of burning fossil fuels.

“With this ruling, Baltimore should receive material that is likely to shed significant light on how the companies—with knowledge of their top executives—intentionally deceived the public about the harm their products caused,” the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement on Tuesday. “Journalists and nonprofit organizations already have turned up documents showing that decades ago ExxonMobil, Shell and others knew that fossil fuel emissions were causing climate change. Instead of acknowledging the problem, fossil fuel companies spent millions of dollars to confuse the public about global warming’s causes and countless hours lobbying against state and federal policies that sought to limit emissions.”

But to environmental advocates dismay, the companies filed for an emergency stay from the Supreme Court and a stay on the ruling to move the case to the state level, arguing that the city’s allegations must be heard in a federal forum, especially because several other similar cases are pending in federal appellate courts. 

“This suit—like a dozen other related suits that have been filed around the country and removed to federal court, and which are now pending in various postures in five of the courts of appeals—raises claims that necessarily arise under federal common law, implicate oil and gas production activities performed at the direction of federal officers and on federal lands, and require resolution in a federal forum,” says the oil companies’ application to Chief Justice John G. Roberts.

The Supreme Court has yet to respond to the companies’ appeal. Federal courts have dismissed similar cases against oil and gas companies for their role in climate destruction. 

Judge Hollander accepted another request from the companies. She extended the stay she placed on her order to keep the lawsuit in state court, which gives the Supreme Court more time to respond. 

Baltimore city officials are hoping the Chief Justice will maintain that the case should be considered in state court.

“At this point, we are simply waiting for the Chief Justice to act on the request made by the defendants to stay the order returning the case to state court,” said City Solicitor Andre Davis in an email. “Until he acts of the request, we are at a standstill at least until Monday. We hope he denies the request and soon.”

The post Supreme Court to Decide Fate Of Baltimore v. Big Oil appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Five years ago, a crude oil train derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and the resulting fire killed 47 people. And this week, City Council encouraged by environmental activists, voted to advance a bill—Bill 17-0150—that would help avoid such a disaster in Baltimore.

Because railroad transport is entirely in the hands of the federal government, the bill seeks to prevent oil terminals the only way it can: by changing zoning codes so that the two crude oil terminals currently in Baltimore cannot expand and no new ones can be built.

Before a hearing about the bill on Feb. 21, many environmentalists gathered in front of City Hall on an in support of the bill.

“There are two terminals that are currently permitted to ship crude oil. They would be grandfathered in under this bill. They just would not be allowed to expand,” said Taylor Smith-Hams of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network said. “This bill would put crude oil terminals into our prohibited use category of our zoning code, and that’s what happens when you become a prohibited use and you’re already in existence, is you just, you can’t expand your operations,”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Mary Pat Clarke and co-sponsor, Ed Reisinger joined activists outside.

“We have companies like CSX and other businesses, they’re looking through the lens of profit, and not the people’s public safety,” Reisinger said.

“If we limit any expansion or new terminals for crude, we begin to diminish the future traffic through and in Baltimore City,” said Clarke.

Activists say some 165,000 residents live in the blast zone—or the area near the tracks where crude oil is shipped that will be affected by an explosion. Keisha Allen, the president of the Westport Neighborhood Association, stressed that its communities like her own that are put at-risk by crude oil terminals.

“The people who are most affected…are already marginalized communities,” Allen said.

In an op-ed by Allen posted on the Beat’s website, she provided a list of train accidents in Baltimore over the past 18 years: the 2001 train derailment in the Howard St. tunnel which caused a fire and water main break; the 2013 Rosedale train explosion; the 2014 retaining wall collapse on 26th Street which affected the railroad below; and a 2016 derailment of a train in the Howard St. tunnel carrying acetone.”

Allen also wrote of the specific problems with crude oil transports: “The crude oil that is transported on these trains is more explosive than conventional oil due to a higher concentration of flammable methane and toxic fracking chemicals mixed in with the crude. To make matters worse, most of the train cars carrying this oil have thin skins, no heat shields, and inadequate protections against punctures in a derailment. So when these train cars puncture, they often explode.”

Advocates who testified at City Hall stressed that crude oil train terminals pose dangers to public health.

“When workers and residents are exposed to the chemicals in crude oil, they can have prolonged respiratory symptoms years after the spill, liver and blood disorders, and even lung cancer,” said Laalitha Surapaneni of Physicians For Social Responsibility.

Councilperson Eric Costello, who opposes the bill said that crude oil is being singled out and provided a slippery slope argument: “Tomorrow it will be jet fuel. On Friday it will be gasoline. Saturday, chlorine. Maybe by Monday we’ll ban sugar,” Costello said.

Activists agreed that other commodities can be harmful, but as Sauleh Siddiqui of Johns Hopkins University Department of Engineering said those products were significantly more regulated: “We know a lot more about them than we know about crude oil, and crude oil is actually the problem here,” he testified.

Valerie Hall, a retired firefighter and resident of Mount Winans, fears firefighters are not properly trained to handle crude oil fires. She found out that there’s not a single hazmat-trained fire fighting unit in all of South Baltimore.

“If we had a derailment, or an explosion of crude oil in South Baltimore on any given one of those five train tracks, it would be catastrophic,” Hall told council.

Opponents fear that the ban will send the wrong message to people conducting business in Baltimore. In his testimony, Jermaine Jones of the AFL-CIO asked, “what message are we sending then to the port when we, by zoning, prohibit this crude oil from happening?”

But Councilperson Mary Pat Clarke says that now is the time to act. She says with oil prices low, there are likely fewer shipments of crude oil taking place within the United States, so “we’re not costing any jobs.”We’re not taking away anything that exists,” she said, “but we don’t want to become a crude oil hub.

The bill passed second reader 14-1. Councilperson Costello who voted no to the ban explained his vote to council and reflected the critiques Clark intended to counter: “By enacting this ban we are further damaging the port’s ability to be competitive. Not only on the Eastern seaboard, but throughout the nation and internationally,” Costello said.

Taylor Smith-Hams  said that by advancing the bill, Baltimore is  “also making sure that we are using our resources strategically and with a long-term vision to be a leader in sustainable development and renewable energy.”

Baltimore is “making sure that we are the clean energy powerhouse that we are capable of being, and not locking ourselves into the economy of the past by building out more fossil fuel infrastructure,” Smith-Hams said.

The bill will go to third reader and then the mayor’s desk in the coming weeks.

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The post City Council, encouraged by activists, moves forward with bill to limit crude oil terminal expansion appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Energy giant TransCanada, known for their Keystone XL Pipeline, is proposing a fracked gas pipeline that would run through Maryland under the Potomac River. On the same day that hundreds of people encircled Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s mansion to demand he reject Trans Canada’s proposal, Maryland officials have asked the Army Corp of Engineers not to issue a permit for this pipeline until the state completes a full environmental review. Last year Hogan surprised many when he signed a statewide fracking ban into effect. Critics say that allowing this pipeline would go against the spirit of that fracking ban. To discuss this issue is Brooke Harper the Chesapeake Climate Action Network’s Maryland Policy Director.

The Real News Network: Maryland’s Department of Environment or MDE, as they’re known, released this letter on Thursday asking the Army Corp of Engineers to withhold the permit for the pipeline. It’s called the Eastern Panhandle Expansion Project. Until MDE can propose, “Special conditions for inclusion in the Corp’s authorization.” Does this mean that your action yesterday was a success? What’s your response to all of this?

Brooke Harper: Our response to MDE has, we’re glad that MDE is taking steps to do a more thorough review and to consider all the impacts that this pipeline would have. But the citizens across Maryland and across West Virginia have been asking for MDE and Governor Hogan to do his job and to do a full thorough 401 in order, because we believe that if they look at the full impact that this pipeline would have, they’d ultimately oppose it, and realize that it’s not worth the risk, and of no benefit to Marylanders to drill underneath the Potomac River. And so, we don’t see this as a victory yet. We see it as a delay and a response to the public pressure and outcry that we’ve been putting on them for over a year. But it’s not a done deal and they still need to require TransCanada to do a 401 and ultimately reject and oppose this pipeline, and keep Maryland frack-free.

RNN: TransCanada says that this pipeline would be completely safe. In an informational video that they produced about this proposed pipeline, they claim, it’s “an environmentally friendly method used across sensitive areas that significantly reduces impact to the land above the drilling site and surrounding communities.” So here, TransCanada is saying that this process is safe. They even say it’s environmentally friendly. They mention that the method is trenchless and that they would use wetland mats. Does any of this make a real difference?

BH: No, it doesn’t make a real difference. If we look at Pennsylvania and Ohio, where they’ve had horrific spills. In Ohio, they’ve had over 146,000 gallons of drilling fluid that was just lost down a hole last month, and prior to that they had two million gallons of drilling fluid spill into wetlands using the same horizontal directional drilling method. In Pennsylvania, with the Sunoco Mariner II Pipeline, we’ve seen drilling fluid spilled three times at the same site. Unfortunately, Governor Hogan, and the MDE administration, and his administration have exempted oversight for the state and for TransCanada for the drilling that will occur underneath the Potomac River. Our state’s not policing them. TransCanada certainly has not been a good neighbor and won’t police itself, as we’ve seen in South Dakota, and it’s just left in the hands, our safety and our drinking water, is just being left in the hand of Trump administration officials with FERC and some of the Army Corp of Engineers.

RNN: So, TransCanada also says that this pipeline would be good for the area because it would create jobs and boost the economy in the Eastern Panhandle District of West Virginia. What’s your response to these claims? Because many agreed that that part of West Virginia really does need an economic boost, so what’s your response to the way that they’re saying that they’re going to do that?

BH: That is absolutely untrue. Recently, a few months ago we were at a meeting where we had representatives talk about the economic benefits of this pipeline. Yet, those officials couldn’t name a single company that had left the area or refused to settle in the area because they didn’t have access to natural gas. West Virginia University recently came out with an economic study that said the Eastern Panhandle had one of the fastest growing economic regions throughout the state. They did that without natural gas. I want to continue to see small businesses thrive, their ecotourism businesses thrive, and they can do that all without a frack gas pipeline.

RNN: Your organization says that this pipeline will threaten the drinking water source of millions. How?

BH: Well, it’s an immediate threat for 100,000 residents in Washington County, just like myself who don’t have a lot of additional backup water sources. And our primary concern is what can happen during construction. We don’t want to be the next Ohio or Pennsylvania to see our water contaminated by spills that happen during the construction of this pipeline.

RNN: Talk a little bit more about the other effects that this pipeline could have and then who in the areas it crosses could be most affected by those affects?

BH: Those areas would be Washington and Berkeley County. On the Mountaineer Gas side, they just had their stormwater runoff permit approved. Unfortunately, they didn’t look at a lot of the things that they needed to consider, like what kind of drilling would be done at waterways and different wetland crossings. How would stream restoration be done? So, there’s a danger to us if something happens on the Mountaineer Gas side, as well as a danger if something happens on the Maryland side with the construction on the Potomac River. So, we really just see it as quite an immediate threat to families not only living in the blast zone if there were to be a pipeline explosion or leak, but our primary concern is during construction, since these projects are being looked at separately and not as a whole, what would the impacts be if there was a spill or leak either on West Virginia or the Maryland side of this and how would those residents be notified and impacted?

RNN: A lot of people are noting that Hogan has supported this statewide fracking ban. He also says that he supports the Paris Climate Agreement. Would approving this new pipeline contradict some of those stances?

BH: I think this is just another contradiction in a long line of Hogan’s contradictions. In 2016, he passed a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act and touted that, but then he vetoed the Clean Energy Jobs Act, which would’ve helped us to meet those greenhouse gas reduction goals. He just signed the Paris Climate Accord and now he’s also doing a massive frack gas expansion of infrastructure throughout our state. I just see this as another way of him flip-flopping and being a green Governor in name only, but not with his actions.

RNN: In an email from Maryland Secretary of the Environment Ben Grumbles, he said, “Yesterday, I sent a letter requesting the Army Corp not to complete its review until we complete ours and have the change to propose special conditions for the Corp’s authorization.” And he goes on: “In keeping with the Hogan administration’s strong commitment to environmental protection and climate change progress, we will insist that any pipeline be subject to stringent environmental safeguards to protect Maryland’s environment, including the Potomac River, at all times.” What’s your response to this review process? What do you think will be in this review process and what do you sort of hope to see?

BH: We don’t know what this review will look like. We don’t know what MDE is going to require and it’s the same—it’s more of the lack of transparency and lack of public notification. We don’t know if it will be what we’ve been requesting all of this time, which is a full thorough 401 review. That hasn’t been specified by the Hogan administration.

RNN: Then after that review process, do you have hope that the permit will be rejected? Is there a chance that it will be?

BH:: We’re hoping that the legal method that the state has to reject this pipeline is, their legal avenue is the 401 certification. So, Governor Hogan and the MDE would need to request that of TransCanada, and that’s the states legal avenue that they could do to deny this pipeline. So, if they don’t do that, I just see this as more smoke and mirrors to look like they’re responding to the public outcry, but instead just delaying.

RNN: If not, then what happens next? What’s the next course of action to prevent this pipeline from being built?

BH: Well, I think we’re doing the best we can on the ground. I think activists are still trying to figure out is to Secretary Grumbles and the Hogan administration, what does this review entail? So, I think it’s finding out more about that. Then just continuing to educate our communities, continuing to get local municipalities to urge Governor Hogan to do the right thing and stop the frack gas pipeline. I know others may be considering what are the recourses for landowners in West Virginia and how can we help them. They’ve started to clear trees on the West Virginia side and to do that. So, I think activists will continue to fight for their landowners over in West Virginia and we’ll continue to pressure Governor Hogan here to keep his fracking promise, and ultimately to deny the Potomac Pipeline.

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Mayor Catherine Pugh ended her inaugural speech in Dec. 2016 by saying “make Baltimore great again,” a confusing nod to Donald Trump’s embattled campaign slogan that disturbed many Baltimoreans. But over the past few weeks, Pugh has borrowed not just a slogan from Trump, but a whole political tactic: attack the media.

During Baltimore Magazine’s Visionaries Panel Discussion on Thursday evening at the Parkway Theatre, Mayor Catherine Pugh took the stage to critique media representations of Baltimore. She spoke just after panelists responded to a question about the “perception problem” that Baltimore faces: that the city is wracked with violence and corruption.

Pugh decried the coverage of a Feb. 7th press conference where a reporter asked her if she had been following the shocking Gun Trace Task Force trial, which has been the source of a number of revelations about police corruption in Baltimore. Pugh said, “No, I have not.”

She continued: “I have to run the city, I don’t have time to sit in a trial.”

She was also asked if she had read about the case or if she’d been briefed on it, and responded, “I don’t have time to just read articles.”

At the Parkway, Pugh claimed her remarks were misconstrued.

“So, we have a media perception problem. It’s always this ‘I gotchu’ moment,” she said.“Do I know what’s going on? Absolutely.”

While Pugh does not have time to read articles about GTTF, she does have time to read media that critiques her and offer point and counterpoint. She went on at the Parkway and said she wished the media would instead focus on how this year “violence is down 37 percent, homicides are down 30-some odd percent in the city.”

Pugh acknowledged the policing problem, and said Baltimore needs to learn “how to do community policing in such a way that the community respects you.” She boasted about how Bloomberg had invested $5 million for the Baltimore Police Department to buy new surveillance cameras, gunshot detection software, and license plate readers.

Darryl DeSousa, Pugh’s appointee for police commissioner, has also been widely criticized in recent days: Ian Dombrowski, his appointee for head of the police department’s internal affairs unit was according to a witness in the Gun Trace Task Force trials this week, involved in an ongoing unworked overtime pay scheme.

She also urged audience members to “change how people see our city,” understanding that “ every single individual, whether they’re homeless or wealthy, deserves respect, a place to live, and that we all want the same thing: we want to love our city.”

This comes weeks after city workers evicted a homeless encampment just blocks away from City Hall. In recent weeks, city officials have also been criticized for not putting any money into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which was voted into effect a year and a half ago.

Mayor Pugh also spoke about the 21st Century Schools program, under which the city received a $1 billion dollar investment to build new schools: “Every child deserves the same thing: a complete education.” She addressed the inequality between schools in different parts of the city. But critics note that Pugh’s administration has not followed through on one of her most important campaign promises: increasing the city’s contribution to public education by 15%. As activist Melissa Schober has noted, Baltimore City currently contributes the third lowest amount per pupils, and the lowest percentage of the whole city budget in all of Maryland’s school jurisdictions.

Pugh also discussed a recent report in The Baltimore Sun, which described her plans to spend up to $150,000 to build a two-room television studio in City Hall. She came under fire for using taxpayer money for this project, but at the Parkway, she said, “it’s not taxpayer money because Comcast gives us money every year because we own that TV station,” referring to the public access channel CharmTV.

She said that the $150,000 rewiring is necessary to help existing media, not to create her own. Pugh claims she told a journalist, “You all come in here every week and plug in your television stations! So we don’t have to risk you blowing up City Hall, we have to rewire this whole building.”

In response to Pugh’s speech, Councilman Ryan Dorsey tweeted: “@MayorPugh50 taking an opportunity to celebrate @Baltimoremag Visionaries to instead bash media. It’s teally disappointing to have Trump for a Mayor.”; “This was so incredibly embarrassing and appalling. It reminded me that we have a Mayor who closed her inaugural speech with “Make Baltimore great again.”

Dorsey was one of the thirty visionaries selected by Baltimore Magazine. He told the Real News, “Baltimore has far more than a perception problem. It has deeply rooted inequities than need to be addressed head-on with more than boosterism and ‘changing the narrative.’”

“If truly innovative and exciting policy changes were happening in Baltimore,” Dorsey said, “that’s what local and national media would be reporting, and that is certainly what the City Council is trying to do.”

He also noted that Pugh’s Department of Transportation is reportedly stalling on the proposal for more bike lanes and public transit that he worked on with a fellow Baltimore Magazine visionary, Liz Cornish of Bikemore.

Last month, the Baltimore Brew reported that Mayor Pugh had used city funds to hire a media consultant for $240 per hour. The consultant, Gregory W. Tucker, told the Brew he is “helping steer communications in the wake of the recent departure of the mayor’s director of public affairs, Anthony W. McCarthy.”

Pugh took the opportunity to “salute the visionaries in our city who believe in Baltimore, who want to be here, who know that it can be a great city—but again, it’s how we move forward together” at the end of her speech.

“Baltimore can be the greatest city in America,” she said.

The Real News reached out to Mayor Pugh’s office for comment but has not yet received a response.

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Melony Hill works at Impact Hub. She’s petite, but with a voice that commands a room. She founded and runs a company called Stronger Than My Struggles, which she calls a “mission-based business to help heal through the written and spoken word.”

She also did sex work for over 20 years. People know her as Sexy Sapphire. She says she has 2.6 million views on Pornhub.

At Baltimore’s observation of the International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers on Dec. 17, Hill spoke before a small crowd. She’s used to sharing her work—she’s a spoken word poet—but this was her first experience discussing sex work before an audience.

Hill said she’s seen people “ignore the cries of ‘me too’ from sex workers” and treat them as disposable.

“No one is disposable,” she said. “They deserve respect. Respect because they’re sex workers? How about respect because they’re human beings?”

As she talked about the difficulties of addressing violence against sex workers “without making all sex workers victims,” her voice wavered slightly, but she seemed confident.

The event was organized by Sex Workers Outreach Project, or SWOP, and held in a small room in Impact Hub on North Avenue, just a few short blocks from “the stroll” on Charles Street where many sex workers trick nightly.

This was the city’s third annual observation of the International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers.

Many depictions of sex workers show them living double lives, but Hill says that in her sex work, she honed skills she could transfer to other trades.

“I was always a writer, so . . . I did a bunch of erotic stories and stuff like that,” she said.

“People say [sex work] is like, easy money,” said Christa Daring, who is the community manager at Baltimore’s Impact Hub, an organizer with SWOP, and a sex worker of 10 years. “Clearly, those are people who have never done sex work . . . to do sex work full time is easily a 60 hour a week job, and most people are not getting rich doing this.”

Hill said some kinds of sex work, like BDSM, can bring in more money than others.

“For me to dominate you, spit on you, things like that, I could charge more money just because I’m a black girl because it’s so rare to find a black girl that enjoys these things and knows how to dom . . . and normally, the ones that are into BDSM are white men,” she said. “It’s always been a thrill to take a white man and take his power and to show him what he deserves.”

Monica Stevens, who runs a support group called Sistas of the T, co-founded the Baltimore Transgender Alliance, and helped organize the event, also spoke about the misconception that sex work is easy.

“[I’m a] psychologist, a mother, a companion, a playmate, all at the same time,” she said.

Sex work isn’t just hard, it can also be dangerous, especially when it’s illegal. And if you’re poor, black, or trans—as many sex workers in Baltimore are—it can be even more dangerous.

At the event, organizers noted that at least two sex workers in Baltimore were killed this year: April Ellis on March 28, and Alphonsa Watson on March 22 (though it should be noted that there was some controversy at the time of Watson’s death as to whether to identify her as a sex worker).

To honor Ellis and Watson, SWOP constructed a memorial for attendees to pay their respects, and Stevens drummed for several minutes on stage.

“If you’re black and trans, then you also have to worry about black men’s egos and their misconceptions of manhood, because it can become dangerous and life-threatening,” said Stevens. “And so I have to deal with getting ‘put in my place,’ and it usually means something violent.”

“I think that dehumanization is why we see so much violence against sex workers,” said Daring. “It’s why serial killers target sex workers, because they know that we are considered less valuable. Police frequently have referred to sex worker murders as ‘no human involved.’”

“The police add to the assault because you can’t go and report it,” Hill added. “It’s either ‘you’re lying’ . . . or ‘you deserved it.’ I’ve experienced it myself. You become a double victim, and that’s really where the pain is.”

Baltimore’s 2016 DOJ report backs this up. The report showed that the Baltimore Police Department routinely refused to investigate sexual assaults and often harassed victims of sexual assault, and that in cases of sexual assault or violence against sex workers, officers often tried “to coerce sexual favors from them in exchange for avoiding arrest.”

“My understanding is that that has not actually lessened,” said Daring. “And in particular we see a lot of arrests around trafficking, but really what that is frequently is a 17-year-old and 19-year-old working together, and the 19-year-old is going to go away for trafficking for 6, 10, 12 years depending on the circumstances.”

One of Daring’s goals in SWOP is to show people why they should not call the police on sex workers.

“If someone is loud on your stoop, calling the police is not the way to deal with that because they could potentially die from that situation or at least have their liberty deprived,” she said. “Most of those women are going to be put into men’s facilities where they’re going to potentially experience a lot more violence.”

Stevens said that even among Baltimore’s activists and organizers, some “want to lock up all of the transgender sex workers” to get them out of their neighborhoods.

“When I suggested to some of them that a better way to approach it might be to maybe create a system where sex workers might have their own housing and their own way of controlling their underground income, they’re like, ‘So do you mean a brothel?,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, why not?’ And so they’re like, ‘Well, that’s illegal.’ . . . They won’t look at a solution that may entirely solve their problem.”

The illegality of prostitution, also known as “full service sex work,” complicates conversations about how to better sex workers’ lives. Some, like Hill, believe that this work should be regulated like other forms of labor, though she did note that “the only reason we need it is for the respect from the police and protection, which is really sucky.”

Others, like Daring, think decriminalization, which would remove all penalties for engaging in sex work, is the more practical current option: “I feel like we have that we are completely unable to treat sex workers fairly and safely on a governmental level.”

Daring noted that decriminalization legislation is currently being considered in New Hampshire, California, and Washington, D.C. But Stevens pointed out that with some people, conversations about the best ways to help sex workers are often obscured by morality: “Even when you debate the ethics of it, if your ethics aren’t practical, then how ethical are they?”

Like the Trans March of Resilience in November, Baltimore’s International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers centered the need to uplift and celebrate life, rather than to mourn loss. The organizers wanted to combat the idea that sex workers should be pitied.

“It’s always this self-reinforcing stereotype, which is like, ‘Well, we would never trust a sex worker to do something else, so that’s all that they’ll ever do,’” said Daring.

It isn’t lost on Daring that these words are spoken in the place of their full-time employment, where they have a managerial position.

Stevens echoed this sentiment: “Have you ever thought about how comfortable people are thinking of us as downtrodden and hopeless and not capable of anything?”

She said when people realize that she isn’t any of those things, they react with fear.

“I’m black and trans, so I’m not supposed to have any intellectual content,” she said. “So then they figure I must have grown up way out in the county somewhere, I must be from some Ivy League school, and it’s like, no, I grew up around 22nd and Greenmount.”

Stevens said that her capabilities can actually make her even more susceptible to violence.

“Part of oppression is being able to control people,” she said. “People get really scared of me because they can’t.”

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“Look out for people missing from this room,” Kevi Smith-Joyner, an activist with the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, said in a tone that was at once critical and encouraging at the Transgender March of Resilience on Nov. 20. “I see no one in the community I work with every day.”

The attendees applauded.

Smith-Joyner was drawing attention to a clear tension. The event was organized by the Baltimore Transgender Alliance (BTA), a group started by trans women of color. But as Smith-Joyner pointed out, a majority of the event’s attendees were white.

As Smith-Joyner spoke, BTA Executive Director Ava Pipitone and BTA Communications Organizer Jamie Grace Alexander nodded and snapped, welcoming the constructive criticism. The two had marshalled the march into the 2640 Space on St. Paul. The march had made its way from North Avenue up “the stroll” on Charles Street, where many trans sex workers—mostly Black—work every night.

Smith-Joyner said there’s work to be done to ensure that sex workers are included in the event, and suggested paying sex workers to forego a night of work to participate in the event.

“If they’re working ‘the stroll’ right now, that’s when they’re making their money,” they said. “I think it’s really important to [hear] the voices of those who are most affected and marginalized the most.”

Jamie Grace Alexander, an event organizer, also addressed these tensions.

“We want to empower all trans people to do what’s best for them,” she said. “If someone’s like, ‘I don’t want to get a job at like Costco or whatever, I want to trick on the street,’ I’m like, ‘bitch, do it.’”

Taylor (who did not want to use her real name), a sex worker and an organizer with the Sex Workers Outreach Project, also noted that sex workers face issues of stigma—but that for many people, especially Black trans people, “it’s not a choice, it’s survival.”

The International Transgender Day of Remembrance was started 18 years ago to honor the lost life of a transgender sex worker named Rita Hester. It is meant to highlight and give respect to the trans lives lost each year to violence. Each year, it’s observed globally by millions. This is Baltimore’s third year recognizing the event.

The Trans Murder Monitoring Project has recorded over 17,000 murders of trans people between 2014 and 2017. And in the U.S., this has been a particularly horrific year for trans people. Last year, a record-breaking 27 trans people were killed in the U.S. and a new report from the Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition shows that 2017 will not be better: At least 25 transgender people have been murdered in the U.S. so far this year. Most of those killed were people of color. In March, a transgender woman named Alphonza Watson was murdered just a few blocks away from 2640 Space.

The event also came during high-profile national conversations about sexual assault and harassment.

“It’s always [cisgender] white women whose stories are heard, especially when they’re beautiful,” said Taylor.

Studies show that roughly half of all transgender people will experience sexual violence in their lives. Still, the BTA is trying “subvert” the focus on grieving and hardships, instead centering resilience.

“The idea is to try and create this sanctuary that’s like, metaphorically and structurally resilient,” Pipitone said as people lined up for free cupcakes and hot meals.

Like Smith-Joyner, Pipitone spoke about the racial and class divides in the room and in Baltimore’s queer and trans communities.

“It’s really class segregated,” she said. “It’s kind of, are you coming from an academic intellectual feminist identity politic that’s very exclusive, or are you coming from a, ‘shit sucks for everybody, here are we all together in this mess of like, LGBT or whatever, let’s dance?’”

Pipitone said the “let’s dance!” crowd is usually more welcoming than the academic feminist one. There was some dancing later in the night.

As the dancing died down, Diane, a homeless trans person who has been presenting as a woman for about a year, spoke about how at home and safe she’d felt at the event. She felt the sense of sanctuary Pipitone had hoped for. But on the streets, she still faces what she called “terrorism” for being trans—from being picked on to “being sexually assaulted in a shelter.”

There’s still work to be done to ensure that she’s safe.

“It makes me angry,” she said.

This piece runs courtesy of the Real News Network.

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