An offer of $40 million seems like a lot to pass up. But it wasn’t nearly enough to persuade some eastern Baltimore County residents to go along with a plan to put sediment from the Patapsco River bottom on an island in the Chesapeake Bay near their homes.

Tradepoint Atlantic, the company redeveloping the former steel mill complex at Sparrows Point, had offered to give that sum to Baltimore County if local officials agreed to let it use Hart-Miller Island as the disposal site for 4.2 million cubic yards of sediment the company plans to dredge up for a new $1 billion ship terminal.

Aaron Tomarchio, Tradepoint’s executive vice president, called the proposed deal a “win-win” for his company and the county’s residents.

Company officials thought it would shorten the timetable for building the new terminal, which is now projected to open in 2028, and provide millions of dollars for long-sought community improvements.

With Baltimore’s economically vital port temporarily shut down last spring by the Key Bridge collapse, Maryland lawmakers quickly embraced the idea.

Their only caveat was that the company would have to reach a “community benefits agreement” with the county before the end of 2024.

Tradepoint promised Baltimore County $40 million in return for rights to deposit Patapsco sediment on an island in the Chesapeake.

About half the money from Tradepoint was to go toward improving the 1,100-acre island, while the rest was to be parceled out for community infrastructure and improvements on the mainland. Some suggested building more playgrounds and ball fields, others wanted streetlights, pier replacements and better fire and emergency services.

Some, though, didn’t want any part of it. At an early October meeting at the North Point branch library, about 90 residents aired fears that the muck to be put on the island would pollute the water and poison their waterfront communities.

Others worried it would destroy wetlands that attract a stunning array of waterfowl, shorebirds and songbirds, including some rarely seen in Maryland.

“You call it dredged material. I call it toxic waste,” said Mary Taylor, a longtime Essex resident. “I think we’ve all been dumped on enough.”

Hart-Miller’s History

Hart-Miller was in fact created with dredged material, more than 100 million cubic yards of it dredged over 25 years to maintain the depths of Baltimore’s shipping channels.

Waterfront residents and environmentalists bitterly opposed the island’s creation back then, arguing the muck would leach toxic contaminants into the Bay, killing fish and threatening public health. They fought the plan in court for several years before finally losing.

The state finally stopped depositing dredged sediment on the island at the end of 2009. Seven years later, the Department of Natural Resources opened a 290-acre state park on the island’s southern end with a sandy beach, picnic tables and campsites accessible only by private watercraft.

The remaining 750 marshy acres on the north side were supposed to be added to the park, but the state has never come up with the estimated $47 million needed for that.

Some residents still suspect the island is polluting, and while there is some groundwater contamination, surface water drained through outfalls meets state discharge limits. Even so, birders flock to take state-guided bird-watching tours of the island’s closed north cell.

The island is one of Maryland’s top birding spots, a migratory rest stop and breeding ground for shorebirds, waterfowl and songbirds

One sunny October morning, a group of camera- and scope-toting birders spotted 73 different winged species, including black-and-white avocets, least bitterns and a majestic pair of trumpeter swans in flight.

The island is one of Maryland’s top birding spots, a migratory rest stop, winter haven and breeding ground for shorebirds, waterfowl and songbirds.

Over the years, more than 300 species have been observed there, two-thirds of all the birds reported in Maryland and almost as many as have been seen at the much larger Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore.

New Plan for Spoils

Joe Corcoran, president of the Baltimore Bird Club, said birders feared that the north cell’s extensive wetland habitat attracting so many birds would be lost for a decade or more if Tradepoint Atlantic spread dredged material there. He and Kathy Lambrow, another club leader, called on the company to pledge to spare at least 100 acres of it from disturbance.

At the North Point library meeting, after 90 minutes of back and forth, organizers asked for a show of hands. Nearly everyone in the room signified their opposition to the deal.

And two days later, before a “steering committee” of neighborhood leaders could vote on whether to recommend approval of the project, Tradepoint Atlantic announced it was withdrawing its offer and would pursue an alternative plan for disposing of its dredged material.

“We don’t want to be in that firefight”  – Aaron Tomarchio, Tradepoint Atlantic.

Tomarchio, who hadn’t been invited to the meeting, attributed the unraveling of the deal to a “vocal minority” that he contended spread misinformation about the plan.

“It was an unfortunate scenario,” he said. But he added that “when we started this process, we said we would listen to the community. . . We don’t want to be in that firefight, forcing the community to do something they didn’t want to do.”

Now, Tomarchio said, Tradepoint is planning to deposit its dredged material elsewhere, and the $40 million the community would have gotten will be spent preparing those other sites.

Some material will fill in an old coal pier at Sparrows Point and some will be placed in an upland impoundment on the peninsula. Some also may be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean – sampling of the sediments found most of it clean enough to meet federal standards for offshore disposal.

Tomarchio has also said that some material could be sent to existing dredge containment facilities at Cox Creek, in Anne Arundel County, or Masonville Cove, in Baltimore, as the result of a commitment from the Maryland Port Administration, which runs those facilities.

County officials, who had supported the deal, expressed disappointment at its collapse.

Paul Brylske, a leader of the Friends of Hart-Miller Island and a member of the steering committee, was unable to attend the meeting, he said, or he would have tried to make the case that the deal was worth more discussion.

Brylske faulted some opponents with making misstatements about the deal. But with such a tight approval timetable, he thought the community hadn’t been given enough time to digest it, and Tradepoint Atlantic hadn’t made enough effort to address public concerns.

“I don’t see the north cell ever becoming a state park. . . because the state’s not going to have the money, and we’re not going to have another opportunity like this,” Brylske said.

Corcoran said he was disappointed, too. But he said that he felt he had no other choice because he never got assurance that bird habitat would be spared.

“Better off to leave it the way it is,” he said, “because the birds are happy out there now.”

– This story was originally published in the Bay Journal.