The Thursday letter from Maryland Secretary of the Environment Serena McIlwain also said the state would not be reissuing the permit, as the EPA requested, because the state had not made a mistake that needed correcting.

The EPA had contended that when Maryland issued the permit to Baltimore-based company US Wind, it identified the wrong process for citizens to file appeals.

Amy Van Blarcom-Lackey, EPA administrator for Region 3, which includes Maryland and other mid-Atlantic states, contended in a July 7 letter that any appeals challenging the air pollution permit issued to US Wind should be filed to the clerk of the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board.

But Maryland argues that its permit would need to be appealed through the state courts, which would involve filing a challenge at the appropriate circuit court — in this case in Worcester County.

Notably, the due date for a state court challenge has already passed. It was set for July 14 — about a month after MDE issued the permit, according to MDE’s website.

“Long-settled procedure dictates that state-issued permits are appealed under State law, not Federal law,” McIlwain’s letter says.

That letter also cites written decisions issued by the EPA’s appeals board, including one that stated that the board “lacked jurisdiction” to evaluate this type of permit.

“MDE will not re-issue the permit and will continue to follow the proper state procedures to consider appeals,” McIlwain concluded, near the end of the roughly two-page letter.

In an emailed response, the EPA stuck to its guns. An EPA spokesperson said the agency had notified MDE that the final permit decision “contains an error, with clear guidance on next steps. But they don’t seem to care about complying with legal requirements.”

The MDE website for the US Wind project originally referenced both the state appeals procedure and the EPA process, but McIlwain said that information had been “included at EPA’s request. It has been removed, and language has been added clarifying that the Federal appeals process does not apply.”

Authority to issue Clean Air Act permits like the one for US Wind is delegated to the state from the EPA — the basis of the federal agency’s claim for jurisdiction for appeals. That authority, specifically for permits on the outer continental shelf, was re-certified in early 2024 under the Biden administration.

The US Wind project, which is planned about 10 miles from Ocean City’s shoreline, is the wind project that is closest to construction in this region. The company, which leased the area in 2014, received a key permit from Democratic President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior at the end of 2024.

Final buildout of the project is still years away, but it calls for construction of 121 wind turbines, up to four offshore substations and one meteorological tower, according to the state’s website. When complete, the project could generate 2,200 megawatts of energy, enough to power up to 718,000 homes, according to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Practically since its inception, the project has faced fierce opposition from local officials in the resort town, who cite concerns that beachgoers would lose a pristine ocean view if the turbines were visible from shore. Since Republican President Donald Trump took office for his second term, offshore wind projects have landed in his crosshairs. Earlier this week, Trump announced that wind and solar projects would undergo increased scrutiny under his administration. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” also rescinds tax credits for renewable energy projects that do not begin construction by next July.

In April, Trump appointed Blarcom-Lackey to lead the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic office. She succeeded Marylander Adam Ortiz, who moved to a deputy secretary role at MDE.

Two other companies have offshore leases in the vicinity of Ocean City and the Delaware beaches — Ørsted and Equinor. While Ørsted received its first lease area around the same time as US Wind, Equinor won its auction last year. Neither project has received its federal permits from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: scrane@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and Bluesky.

They didn’t quite make it.

So as they drafted the next agreement, which was released to the public Tuesday, they did things a little differently: Some targets shifted, deadlines were staggered and some goals have yet to be set, awaiting new computer modeling that will show the most up-to-date picture of bay pollutants, according to Maryland Matters.

The preliminary plan includes refreshed goals for oyster restoration, underwater grass acreage, public access sites and wetland plantings, among a host of other subjects. And that’s before terms like “diversity” and “climate change” were tweaked at the request of the Trump administration.

But officials think the plan, months in development and still months from completion, will be worth it.

“One thing we’ve heard over and over again — and frankly, probably since the beginning of time with this agreement — is the need for it to be something that people actually can understand and see themselves in. And I think we worked really hard to make sure that each one of these outcomes did just that,” said Maryland Secretary of Natural Resources Josh Kurtz, who chairs the Chesapeake Bay Program committee that was behind Tuesday’s revisions.

The draft plan includes different deadlines for different outcomes: Some goals are set for 2030, many are in 2035 or 2040. Kurtz said that allowed for a more individualized approach to each goal, making use of the latest science.

“That’s one of the places we’re most excited to get feedback from the public,” Kurtz said. “Is 10 years right? Is 15 years right? Do we want to set targets that are more interim?”

One of the key goals of the 2014 plan was to limit nitrogen and phosphorus runoff and sediment pollution, the villains behind the bay’s oxygen-deprived summer “dead zones” where crabs, oysters and fish can no longer survive. Sediment goals had been met by last year, but the six bay states and the District of Columbia had achieved only 92% of phosphorus reduction goals and 59% of the nitrogen target, despite billions being spent.

The new plan gives experts until 2030 to develop a goal for nutrients and sediment, as they await new data from an updated computer model that estimates pollution flow, said Anna Killius, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which convenes lawmakers from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia to discuss bay issues.

“That process of updating the model takes time, and has to be peer reviewed. And so, we’re not in a place where we can speed that up, and really still call it sound, good science,” Killius said. “We can’t really put new numbers in place — or ask the jurisdictions to plan around those numbers — until we’ve got that model up and running.”

The nutrient and sediment targets are not likely to change, since they were set in 2010 by the Environmental Protection Agency. The new plan will likely focus on a new timeline or methodology for achieving the total maximum daily load, or TMDL.

“We’re working with the how,” Killius said. “So, what is going to be our plan of attack in getting to what the TMDL tells us we need to do?”

The new computer modeling was originally expected January, but officials now expect about a yearlong delay before that’s done, said Lee McDonnell, acting director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program office.

Kurtz said Bay Program officials understand that the lack of new nutrient and sediment timelines may “lend a feeling of uncertainty” to the bay restoration effort.

“That’s why we’re going to be doing a lot of public outreach,” Kurtz said, including about the computer model.

Keisha Sedlacek, federal director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the number of “gaps and holes” in the 2025 draft are a concern — in some places, including goals for conserved lands, the draft includes blanks in lieu of specific numbers. She would also like to see a consistent deadline, such as 2040, with periodic check-ins along the way.

“If we set these interim targets and actually evaluate the program — not every 10 years, but every couple of years — to see what tweaks we need to make based on the best available science, we’ll have a stronger, more efficient program moving forward,” Sedlacek said.

The update comes at a time of uncertain federal support for bay cleanup programs. The Trump administration has moved to slash funding for agencies that assist with bay cleanup, including the EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — but it has so far proposed stable funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program, which Trump had targeted for elimination during his first term.

Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, which represents about 300 environmental organizations in the bay region, said the $92 million in funding for the Bay Program, while it is critical, is only “one piece of the puzzle.”

“These states and federal agencies are recommitting to the work and coming up with these revised goals and outcomes,” Reilly said, “when it’s being proposed that the infrastructure around achieving them could be gone.”

In a statement, new EPA Region 3 Administrator Amy Von Blarcom-Lackey, said her agency “stands unwavering in its commitment to restore the Bay and its watershed.”

“EPA is investing in the future of the Chesapeake Bay and continues to support our state and local government partners to implement on-the-ground projects that improve water quality and restore living resources along this essential ecosystem,” her statement said.

Blarcom-Lackey, who was raised on a Pennsylvania dairy farm and has a background in agricultural lobbying, did not say whether the EPA would continue enhanced enforcement efforts in Pennsylvania that started during the Biden administration. Pennsylvania, with its high density of farmland, is one of the states furthest behind on its goals for nutrients and sediment.

Mindful of the administration’s antipathy toward climate change and DEI, Reilly said some language in the document changed at the request of federal agencies. While the 2014 agreement cited “climate resiliency,” the 2025 version references “changing environmental conditions.” The 2025 draft also jettisons a reference to “diversity” in cleanup efforts, instead calling for a  “wide range of engaged individuals whose communities enjoy access to the waters and natural landscapes of the region.”

Killius said the committee wanted to bypass buzzwords and focus on “saying what we mean.”

Killius said the new bay agreement was also informed by a groundbreaking 2023 study, called the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response, or CESR. That report cited a number of reasons for the struggle to attain the 2025 goals — and for the bay’s lackluster response to the pollution reductions achieved thus far — including the possibility that the Bay Program’s current computer model could be overestimating phosphorus reductions.

But mainly, while jurisdictions were able to cut pollution from wastewater treatment plants and other “point” sources, they struggled to reduce pollution from “nonpoint” sources, including farm fields and city streets.

The report delivered a sobering message: Portions of the bay, especially the deepest reaches, may never meet criteria such as dissolved oxygen standards. Targeting shallow-water areas, and triggering an ecosystem turnaround, could have more impact on the health of the bay than focusing on the total nutrient runoff and its impact on the deep channel.

Killius points to a section in the revised agreement about fish habitat, which calls for a focus on improving “the quantity and quality of shallow water fish habitat in tidal areas.” Kurtz points to revised oyster goals, which include mention of aquaculture and the native fishery, rather than on oyster sanctuaries — where no harvesting occurs.

But some observers worry that the agreement hasn’t gone far enough to address nonpoint source pollution and restore ecosystems. That includes Gerald Winegrad, a former state senator, vocal critic of current bay policy and Capital Gazette columnist.

He noted that some goals were revised downward, including for forested lands and wetlands. While the 2014 agreement called for states to “create or re-establish 85,000 acres of tidal and non-tidal wetlands” by 2025, the draft calls for 3,000 restored acres by 2035.

“When you look at forest cover, and you look at [forest] buffers, and you look at wetlands — three very important things, like the heart, lungs, kidneys of the bay — it is a complete flop compared to what was already required,” Winegrad said of the draft document.

He was frustrated, too, that the agreement didn’t specifically mention the TMDL numbers for nutrient and sediment reductions — or set a new deadline.

“This has been kicking the can down the road, moving the goal post — all the worst little idioms you can use to say that there is no political courage to really restore the Chesapeake Bay with the hard choices that have to be made,” Winegrad said.

Targets for restoring submerged aquatic vegetation were also revised down from a goal of 130,000 acres by 2025, to interim targets of 90,000 acres by 2030 and 95,000 acres by 2035.

Leila Duman, Chesapeake and coastal bays restoration officer for Maryland DNR, said the ultimate goal is still to reach 196,000 acres of grass coverage across the entire bay.

“That said, that’s not something we can get to in the next 10 years,” Duman said. “Part of this revision process was really about making goals achievable.”

The agreement also includes altogether new goals, such as a first-time goal for freshwater mussels, calling for development of mussel conservation plans in five bay tributaries by 2035. Filter feeders, like mussels and oysters, remove harmful nutrients from the water, making them a critical piece of the effort to cut pollution in the estuary.

“The oyster goal is so important,” Kurtz said. “But that really is focused on the tidal part. And what mussels really gets us is more of that work in the freshwater space.”

On the bay’s beloved blue crabs, the draft agreement calls for keeping the fishery at sustainable levels, but defers to a baywide stock assessment, which is coming out in 2026, on what the population levels ought to be.

Kurtz acknowledged that not all parts of the draft plan use specific numbers just yet.

“But I think that’s also reflective of reality. We’re continually improving the science,” he said.

After revisions, the document will head to the Bay Program’s executive council, which includes state and federal leaders such as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, for final approval. Officials are urging interested parties to submit feedback as soon as possible — before a Sept. 1 deadline, Kurtz said.

“If you are a community that reads this and says: ‘Well, this isn’t for us,’ we need to know that,” Kurtz said. “Because we want this to be for every single person within this massive watershed.”

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: scrane@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and Bluesky.

At least two laws, both focused on energy policy, were in the crosshairs this year.

One group — which registered itself as the Maryland Environment, Labor and Industry Coalition — planned to challenge the Next Generation Energy Act, and focus its campaign on trash incinerators, which will no longer receive a renewable energy subsidy under the law.

Another group, led primarily by Maryland farmers, started collecting signatures to challenge the Renewable Energy Certainty Act, which focuses on solar farm siting in the state.

But ultimately, neither group submitted signatures before the May 31 deadline, when they needed 20,053. To actually get on the ballot in 2026, groups would have needed to assemble about 60,000 signatures by June 30.

The lack of submissions means Maryland will go another year without a statewide referendum on the ballot. The last one was in 2012, when voters petitioned to get same-sex marriage on the ballot, and ultimately the electorate approved it.

This year, both groups had pushed for Democratic Gov. Wes Moore to veto their bills, but he signed each during his final bill signing session of the year, on May 21.

With just 10 days until the deadline, a representative of the MELIC group said a formal signature campaign was unlikely.

But the farming community decided to throw the Hail Mary, and collected thousands of signatures in an attempt to hit the cutoff.

The solar bill essentially prohibits local governments from establishing zoning rules that preclude large solar fields, and sets uniform statewide standards for solar sites.

But farmers are particularly concerned by a provision that caps solar facilities to 5% of “priority preservation areas,” or agricultural land, in any one county. They argue the ceiling is too high, and could take too much farmland out of production. Many believe that no farmland should be used for solar panels whatsoever.

“While this cap is certainly better than nothing, it still leaves thousands of acres of farmland open to commercial solar development,” wrote Maryland Farm Bureau President Jamie Raley in a recent statement. “The result of this bill is concerning, but it only strengthens our resolve to keep fighting for Maryland’s farmland.”

Jay Falstad, a leader of the solar energy petition effort, said that his group amassed just under 20,000 signatures before they ran out of time. They estimated that they would have needed at least 23,000 to meet the state’s cutoff, because signatures are frequently tossed out for non-compliance with a strict set of state rules.

But Falstad, who is a founder of Farmers Alliance for Rural Maryland, or FARM, said that a State Board of Elections official initially informed him that he’d have until Monday, June 2 — the next business day after the May 31 deadline — to make the submission.

Falstad was shellshocked when officials reached out on May 30 to say he’d only have until midnight on the 31st. He’s confident he could have reached the cutoff number with a few extra days.

“We would have made the necessary number, had it not been for this accelerated timeline,” said Falstad, who is also the executive director of the Queen Anne’s County Conservation Association. “The momentum was on our side.”

Jared DeMarinis, Maryland’s state administrator of elections, said that the initial communication, allowing until June 2, was in error. While other state election deadlines, such as business contribution filings, can move to the next business day, the ballot petition filing deadline cannot move, under the state constitution, he said.

“When we found out of a mistake, we made sure that they were aware of it,” DeMarinis said. “It is in the Maryland constitution, so it’s not like it was hidden in any sort of fashion.”

Regardless of the outcome, Falstad said he was impressed by the strong response to the petition drive. Organizers received signatures from each Maryland county, he said, although the effort was focused in rural areas on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as well as in Montgomery, Harford and Carroll counties, Falstad said.

Falstad himself collected signatures on the Eastern Shore at fairgrounds and ballfields, farm stores and local parks.

“We had people running from their car to the pavilion to sign the petition through rain and thunder,” Falstad said. “The level of commitment and dedication on the part of people that wanted to sign the petition was inspiring.”

When Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed — killing six construction workers and sending thousands of tons of concrete and steel hurtling into the Patapsco River — Carver feared that the foundation’s nearby oyster reef would be smothered beneath the sediment and debris.

“I thought all of our little buddies out there would be dead,” said Carver, the foundation’s Baltimore Harbor Environmental Education Program captain.

He had last visited the reef, located beside historic Fort Carroll, the night before the tragedy, when he dredged up some oysters from the river bottom for a regular check-up. It would be about six months before he could return to inspect the reef, upon which 6 million oysters have been planted since 2008.

What he found surprised him. Healthy oyster after healthy oyster.

“These are resilient little things,” Carver said.

This month, the Bay Foundation began planting oysters at the fort for the first time since the bridge fell. In two boat trips to the site, schoolchildren and other volunteers have tossed an estimated 128,187 oysters overboard to start their new lives in the Patapsco. The goal is to plant half a million oysters there this summer.

Last year, with maritime traffic limited in the Patapsco River channel during the typical planting season, oysters grown in and around the Baltimore Harbor that would have gone to Fort Carroll were planted in the Magothy River instead.

It was a hard decision, said Kellie Fiala, Maryland oyster restoration coordinator for the Bay Foundation. Staffers toyed with keeping the oysters in their dockside cages, and waiting to plant them at the fort, a manmade island fortress that never saw battle, but has become a sanctuary for cormorants, gulls and other seabirds. But keeping the oysters out of the reef during peak feeding season could have caused some to perish, Fiala said.

“People were very understanding, but we’re very excited to get oysters back in Baltimore, in the Patapsco River, where people are growing them,” she said.

Aboard the Snow Goose, the Bay Foundation’s educational vessel, volunteers start by counting the number of oysters, which appear as small dots on the rough grey shells, on a selection of shells. From there, they estimate the total number of mollusks that will be planted.

Once they reach Fort Carroll the process is simple: Volunteers grab a bright blue basket filled with oysters, and dump them over the side of the boat and into the murky depths.

But getting each oyster ready for release day is a bit more complicated.

It begins at the Bay Foundation’s Oyster Restoration Center in Shady Side, where oyster larvae are placed in tanks with recycled oyster shells, their preferred substrate. The setup mimics a natural process, which has become more difficult for baby oysters as the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster reefs dwindle.

“Imagine being fertilized, being born, and then having two weeks to find your forever home,” Fiala said. “That’s what they have to do.”

Once the baby oysters adhere to a shell, they’re known as spat. Afterwards, the spat-on-shell bound for Fort Carroll are moved to submerged cages around the Baltimore Harbor, where they are minded by volunteer “oyster gardeners” for their first year of life.

The cages help shelter the vulnerable young oysters, and keep them from sinking into the mud, serving the function of oyster reefs, which once rose above the surface of the Chesapeake in some places, snarling passing ships.

Domino Sugars in downtown Baltimore is a longtime “gardener,” and contributed tens of thousands of oysters to a planting this week, the second since the Key Bridge fell. Others came from the Seagirt Marine Terminal in Dundalk and Vane Brothers in South Baltimore, which are newer participants.

Frits de Goede, operations manager for Ports America Chesapeake, which operates Seagirt, said the group wants to up its game next year, in hopes of inching closer to Domino’s oyster number. Ports America grew 5,580 oysters this year, compared to Domino’s 21,060.

“We’re trying to work up to that,” de Goede said.

Gardeners periodically pull up the cages attached to their docks, and clean off any algae or debris, to ensure that the oysters get plenty of water flow.

Oysters are filter feeders, which means that they pull nutrients from the water column in order to survive and grow.

Therein lies their value to the Chesapeake Bay, which is beset by excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, runoff from farm field fertilizer and sewage treatment plant discharges, among other sources. The excess nutrients spur the growth of algae, which essentially suck oxygen from the water as they die, creating hazardous anoxic conditions — “dead zones” — for crabs and fish.

But adding more oysters in the Chesapeake means more nutrients will be filtered out, strengthening ecosystems and further growing the natural oyster population.

Decimated by disease, harvesting and habitat loss, the bay’s oyster population has plummeted since the 1800s. While it once took Chesapeake oysters an estimated three days to a week to filter all the water in the bay, it now takes more than a year, Fiala said.

“We also couple that with the fact that there’s more people in the bay watershed than ever before having an impact. So, we need more oysters in the water than we have ever had,” Fiala said.

The strategy could be working. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources released a summary of its latest stock assessment for oysters in Maryland portions of the bay, which found that the population increased from 2.4 billion adult oysters in 2005 to 7.6 billion in 2024.

Back then, Maryland’s oyster population was just starting to recover from devastating bouts of disease, such as MSX and Dermo.

Mike Wilberg, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who led the assessment, pointed to three reasons for the increasing trend in a news release from the department.

“The first one is that we have had some good spatsets,” he said. “The second one is that natural mortality rates, or particularly disease, hasn’t been as bad as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. And then the last one is that the department has maintained restrictions on harvesting that have allowed the oysters that are in some of these areas to continue to survive and reproduce.”

The stock assessment doesn’t include oyster sanctuaries like the ones at Fort Carroll, focusing instead on oyster bars that are open to harvesting. But large-scale restoration sites, planted by DNR and partner organizations, make up substantial portions of several harvest regions — and they’re likely strengthening the oyster harvest in their areas, Wilberg said in the news release.

“The three major restoration sanctuaries that are pretty much finished have all been really strong successes,” Wilberg said.

But the Bay Foundation believes there’s more to be done.

In a 2024 report entitled “Hope on the Half Shell,” the foundation pushed for Maryland and Virginia to establish sanctuaries in an additional 20 tributaries, ensure that 11 existing tributaries are maintained, and bolster the aquaculture industry, which grows oysters for consumption, by leasing more areas to proprietors.

There are two small sanctuaries on either side of Fort Carroll, Fiala said: a 2-acre plot and a 1-acre plot. In part to protect those two areas, the Bay Foundation is keeping a close eye on the effort to demolish the remainder of the Key Bridge and build its successor, said Gussie Maguire, Maryland staff scientist at the foundation.

“There are certain practices that can be put in place — and that we’re advocating for — to minimize the impacts of disturbing the sediment with the explosives and all that,” Maguire said. “Silt curtains on land, turbidity curtains in the water.”

In a September 2024 letter to the Maryland Department of the Environment, which is in charge of permitting for the new bridge site, the Bay Foundation highlighted the importance of the reefs.

While testing found the reefs in “relatively good” shape after the collapse and the subsequent salvage effort, “more extensive disturbances” could “impact these nearby reefs in the absence of proper precautions,” wrote Allison Colden, the Bay Foundation’s Maryland executive director.

“Nearly every weekday during the spring and fall school season, students sample the reefs at Fort Carroll to learn about the importance of oysters for water quality, habitat, and biodiversity,” Colden wrote. “The protection of these areas from disturbance and damage associated with bridge reconstruction will be critical.”

The Bay Foundation is also pushing for the rebuilt bridge to include new features such as upgraded filtration for stormwater, reducing the amount of rainwater that washes off the bridge’s roadway and directly into the Patapsco, carrying pollutants with it.

That could include the addition of a piping system with filters included, but it could also include the installation of rain gardens, known as bioswales, on either end of the new bridge, like at the Aurora Bridge in Washington State, the Bay Foundation said. Or the new bridge could host floating wetlands that could filter pollutants, like the ones installed at Baltimore’s National Aquarium nearby.

The new bridge will be wider than its predecessor, potentially increasing the discharge of pollutants “including trash, oil and grease residues, salt and brine during winter weather, and tire dust and other sediments,” and increasing the necessity of adequate stormwater treatment, Colden said.

In the meantime, the return of oyster plantings mere feet from the Key Bridge wreckage is a welcome symbol of the city’s toughness, Fiala said.

“Baltimore has a lot more behind it — a lot more resilience — than I think people give it credit for,” Fiala said.

The department — which is tasked with housing and providing programs for incarcerated young people, among other functions — failed to consistently ensure that criminal background checks were completed for every contractor working at state juvenile detention centers and treatment facilities, according to the audit.

As of Jan. 3, the contractor, who auditors said was convicted of second-degree assault and possession of a dangerous weapon with the intent to injure, was still working for a DJS vendor.

It was just one of the findings of the 75-page audit released Tuesday by the Office of Legislative Audits, which also reported DJS staff working large amounts of overtime without adequate checks and balances, poorly documented procurements and payments, and a lack of inventories of food and other supplies.

In a written response to auditors, Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi noted that the audit covered April 1, 2020 through Dec. 31, 2023. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore took office in January 2023.

“The vast majority of the audit period preceded the current administration. Since coming on board, our team has made it a priority to identify and address operational weaknesses both prior to and throughout the audit period,” Schiraldi wrote.

It’s the latest flare-up for the somewhat embattled secretary. In January, Maryland lawmakers grilled Schiraldi during a three-hour hearing about a “troubling” report on the agency’s performance, including concerns about staffing and juveniles who recommit crimes and are returned to the department’s custody.

In its response to the May audit, the agency acknowledged the issues with background checks, and in other areas.

“We agree with the recommendation and have developed a generic email address for all vendors to report the findings of their criminal background checks as part of the employment process,” DJS officials said.

The agency said it will evaluate whether any contract modifications need to be made to address background checks. It estimated that fixes could be in place by Jan. 31, 2026.

Auditors also found that DJS did not require or obtain updates about any criminal activity by vendors after a contract award. If a contractor was convicted of a disqualifying crime after an initial background check, DJS would not know, unless the vendor reported it voluntarily.

High reliance on overtime

The audit also results pointed to a high reliance on overtime at DJS facilities.

In 2023, 10 employees received overtime payments that were greater than their base salaries. A top overtime recipient earned nearly $87,000 in overtime payments, supplementing their salary of $56,750. Also in 2023, 244 DJS employees received overtime payments that totaled more than 50% of their regular earnings.

The agency spent $14.9 million on overtime in 2023, exceeding its overtime budget by more than $4 million, according to the audit. It was a significant increase compared to 2021, when the agency paid $10.4 million on overtime, and came in under budget.

The Juvenile Services agency failed to ensure that employees who worked double shifts on four or more consecutive days received approval from the director of residential services.

The agency also did not “ analyze overtime to identify employees who received significant overtime payments and possible steps to reduce the amount of overtime worked,” according to the audit.

In its response, the agency said that it began reviewing overtime in December 2024, and has done so “every pay period since.” The agency pledged to review the policy on double shifts, and general overtime use.

“DJS will review the current process to ensure it is reasonable and provides adequate data to the appropriate staff to make informed assessments of overtime utilization,” read the response from the agency, which said it expects to complete its review by Sept. 30.

No inventories of supplies

The audit also found that, at key facilities, DJS did not conduct required physical inventories of food, medicine, clothing, hygiene products and games, among other items at its facilities.

“For example, at both facilities DJS did not periodically conduct physical inventories or maintain a record of food on hand as required, which would allow for DJS to avoid over-purchasing and waste, and to detect theft,” read the audit.

In his statement to auditors, Schiraldi said that his agency has implemented a new tracking system for the supplies.

“The new system will automate tracking (scan upon receipt) to significantly improve the efficiencies of inventory management,” read the agency’s response.

DJS also failed to check up on its facilities, after its Office of Inspector General identified issues. DJS would receive a corrective action report from the facility staff, but wouldn’t verify that fixes were actually completed, the audit said. In its response, the agency pledged to put fixes in place by June 30, and monitor corrective actions at the facilities.

Missing documentation

When it came to signing contracts with vendors, the audit also found that DJS couldn’t provide all the required documentation for five contracts totaling $27.6 million.

“As a result, we could not readily determine the propriety of any of these five awards,” auditors wrote.

To pay its contractors, the agency leaned on “direct voucher payments” 57% of the time in the audit period, circumventing state policy. These payments are made without matching a correlating purchase order or invoice.

In its response, DJS expressed concern about a new policy from the comptroller’s office, reducing “the timeframe for agencies to process and pay vendor invoices from 25 days to 15 days, which has presented operational challenges in ensuring that purchase orders (POs) are always in place.”

DJS said it checked its own direct voucher payments, and determined that 80% were supported by purchase orders or other documentation.

In one instance, DJS management paid $1.5 million of a $1.7 million price tag to a contractor before work was performed — overruling a DJS staffer. Four months later, the vendor completed the job, which involved installing modular homes at a DJS facility.

The department pledged to provide better documentation of its decision-making, but argued the decision to pre-pay about 90% of the cost for the modular homes was “appropriate to facilitate the timely delivery.”

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: scrane@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and Twitter.

About 250 Maryland AmeriCorps workers were dismissed over the weekend, said Paul Monteiro, Maryland Secretary of Service and Civic Innovation.

“We had to start making calls Friday evening into Saturday morning to inform them of the immediate termination of their grants,” Monteiro said. “Many of our members will likely face subsistence-level challenges, given that they’re ineligible for unemployment insurance and were already living on very modest stipends.”

The list includes 41 members of the Maryland Conservation Corps, who were expecting to continue working through the popular summer season at state parks, maintaining hiking trails, clearing invasive species and educating visitors, said Rachel Temby, deputy director of the Maryland Park Service.

“The impacts of this hasty decision have been felt from the mountains of Western Maryland to the shores of the Atlantic,” Temby said.

After a stop-work order was issued Saturday, state officials rushed to call all of the workers, some of whom were helping with weekend events such as the Pollinator Festival at Assateague State Park and the Market Fair at Fort Frederick, Temby said.

“They were pulled from service, and then many of them made the independent — and very considerate — decision to return as park volunteers to those activities that weekend, wishing to continue with their commitment to serve in any capacity they could,” Temby said.

A primary concern is that the AmeriCorps members will suddenly lose their “very modest” cost-of-living stipends, Monteiro said, forcing them to reconsider things like housing and health insurance.

“Our department is doing our level best to support demobilized members,” Monteiro said. “The first of the month is here in short order, and [members will be] accessing housing, accessing food, on top of being separated from organizations and networks they’ve been invested in over the course of the year.”

The members, between 17 and 25 years old, also expected to receive an educational stipend of about $7,000 at the end of their service terms, which they could use to pay student loans, Now, they are likely to receive a pro-rated portion of the stipend — not the whole thing.

A Moore administration official said Wednesday that the “bare bones” administrative staff at AmeriCorps, “gives me a lot of heartburn” about workers’ benefits.

Maryland is one of 24 states and the District of Columbia that are suing the Trump administration over its steep and sudden cuts to AmeriCorps. The lawsuit says that on April 15 AmeriCorps officials, at the behest of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), put all members of the National Civilian Community Corps on leave, and told them their service would be terminated on April 30. A day later, the suit says, AmeriCorps put about 85% of its paid staff of about 700 workers on administrative leave.

Last week, AmeriCorps began sending reduction-in-force notices to the paid staff and on Friday, after regular business hours, it began notifying states that about $400 million of AmeriCorps programs were immediately terminated.

The lawsuit argues that only Congress, not the administration, has the power to slash the agency.

“The Administration’s abrupt decision to dismantle AmeriCorps flouts Congress’s creation of AmeriCorps and assignment of agency duties; usurps Congress’s power of the purse and thereby violates the Constitution’s separation of powers,” the suit says.

Maryland Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz said Wednesday that the Conservation Corps program, which began in 1984, has had an immense impact on state parks.

“If you’ve hiked on a trail, if you’ve gone to a bathroom in a state park, you most likely are touching a project that the Maryland Conservation Corps has done over the years,” Kurtz said.

DNR was projected to contribute about $1.6 million to the Conservation Corps program this year, the agency said, with AmeriCorps contributing about $922,000.

According to a DNR news release from last August, that year’s graduating class improved more than 2,400 acres of parks and public lands; planted more than 9,963 native trees, bay grasses and plants; treated more than 7,902 trees against harmful insects and diseases; and taught environmental education programs to more than 23,750 visitors.

Conservation Corps members have been instrumental in protecting one of the state’s older forest ecosystems, located in Swallow Falls State Park, said DNR spokesman AJ Metcalf. The area includes thousands of eastern hemlock trees, which have been victimized by invasive hemlock wooly adelgids.

In 2024, Conservation Corps members treated more than 7,000 of the trees, saving them from early deaths. The pesticide application took six days, but will last seven years, Metcalf said.

“Hemlock treatment is a simple process but requires significant human energy,” Metcalf wrote. “Many MCC members report that hemlock restoration work was one of the most rewarding projects of their term.”

For the individuals who spend a year in the corps, the program is a “career ladder,” Kurtz said, allowing them to gain skills that fuel careers in conservation fields. More than 50 current staff members at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources are Conservation Corps alumni, Temby said.

Temby said she supervised teams of Conservation Corps members for about six years, in her role as a Maryland Park Service ranger, and watched the program evolve, propelled by energetic workers.

“The sudden decision to terminate AmeriCorps funding for this program has dire impacts on the hopes and dreams of our corps members, but also the operations of the Maryland Park Service,” Temby said.

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: scrane@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and Twitter.

In recent weeks, the department has begun dispatching the “weights and measures” inspectors to public EV charging stations around the state for the first time, in response to customer complaints, said Alison Wilkinson, the agency’s chief of weights and measures.

It might come as a relief for EV drivers, including Agriculture Secretary Kevin Atticks, who said he sometimes struggles to find reliable chargers for his state-issued electric car.

“It’s become more important, obviously, as I can’t get back from someplace, because I go to three different places, and I spend an hour sitting there … And it’s not charging,” Atticks said in a recent interview.

Wilkinson said the weights and measures team won’t police chargers for their “uptime,” or how often they work for motorists, instead making sure that each charger gives an accurate accounting of the electricity it is dispensing, and charges consumers accordingly.

But if an inspector visits an inoperable charger, Wilkinson said her agency would take action, notifying the operator and requiring fixes.

“We do not oversee uptime. That does not fall under Weights and Measures authority. However, under Weights and Measures authority, it does specify that the device owner is required by Maryland law to maintain their devices in an accurate working state for the consumer,” Wilkinson said.

Already, inspectors have temporarily shut down a “handful” of EV chargers for violations, Wilkinson said, mostly for illegally charging customers by the hour, rather than by kilowatt-hour, potentially penalizing customers for slower charging.

The inspection program comes as the electric vehicle industry faces an uncertain future, with the new presidential administration reneging on support for EVs and rescinding significant funding for charging infrastructure, including the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula program, which was expected to fund dozens of chargers along highways in Maryland.

“The industry as a whole is facing strong headwinds coming out of Washington, D.C., so it does pose a question for a state like Maryland that has bold EV goals,” said Josh Cohen, head of policy for SWTCH charging company. “Is now the time to impose unwieldy regulations on chargers while the industry is still just getting off the ground?”

But some legislators say the problem is significant enough to warrant inspections.

‘EV charging station police’

Aside from Tesla chargers, which have a reputation for reliability, “the record is not tremendous,” said state Sen. Shelly Hettleman, a Baltimore County Democrat. That frustrates existing EV drivers and could stymie future purchases, all while the state is trying to encourage EV purchases to meet climate goals, she said.

“The last thing we want is for people who have made the investment in an EV to throw up their hands and go back to a gas guzzler,” Hettleman said.

She introduced Senate Bill 913, that would have codified the Agriculture Department’s authority to inspect EV chargers and called on it to develop and enforce new reliability requirements for chargers, which would have to be operational about 97% of the time. The bill failed, in part because it had a high cost of implementation during an incredibly tight year for the state budget.

But the Agriculture Department determined that it could begin inspections without a new law, using its existing authority over weights and measures. That’s because the department follows a national weights and measures policy — the National Institute of Standards and Technology Handbook 44 — that has already been updated to include assessments for EV chargers.

Lanny Hartmann, a Maryland EV driver and blogger focused on charging, participated in a survey of charging infrastructure around the state in late 2024 and early 2025. It found that about half of the state’s chargers were owned by electric vehicle manufacturers Tesla and Rivian, and those ports were 99% operational.

But the remaining chargers were inoperable 31% of the time, Hartmann said in testimony on Hettleman’s bill. He said many of those chargers are funded by public dollars, or were installed by electric utilities using ratepayer funds, under a program run by the Maryland Public Service Commission that is currently under evaluation.

But Hartmann said he is “not convinced that the solution is to appoint the government as the EV charging station police.” He worries that if the state places new inspection costs on charging companies, that cost would be passed onto consumers.

“Every penny that the price goes up … adds up, and there’s already been a disturbing trend of the price of public charging creeping up,” Hartmann said.

Over $100K for testing equipment

The Agriculture Department in January began registering service technicians, who install, repair and calibrate EV chargers. The registration fee is $250 per agency, $75 per technician and an additional $25 for a required test.

The department will begin requiring registrations for every consumer-facing charging device next, Wilkinson said, with regulations being drafted now that could take effect this fall or winter. She said costs of the program will be covered by annual registration fees, which haven’t been determined yet. The cost per device will depend on “the amount of time and effort that would be put into it,” the number of workers needed and the overall cost of equipment for the program, Wilkinson said.

In order to conduct the inspections, the department still needs to purchase large testing equipment known as a standard. Each machine costs more than $100,000, and the department will also need vehicles to transport them, and training for staff, Wilkinson said.

She said the department will likely need two or three more staff members to handle the EV charger inspections. The state will be aiming to visit all Maryland chargers every few years.

Inspecting EV chargers could present challenges that inspecting gas pumps don’t, Wilkinson said. Unlike gas stations, some EV charging stations are inside parking garages, meaning inspectors might have to pay just to access them.

Then, they will need to pay for the power at each station — at a gas station, inspectors can just return any fuel they pump without incurring a charge, Wilkinson said.

And slower EV chargers might be in use for hours at a time, increasing the chances that inspectors would have to leave and return later for testing.

“We have a pretty good idea how we’re going to move forward, but there will still be some hurdles to address along the way, just as there is with any new emerging technology,” Wilkinson said.

Cohen, of SWTCH, said his company supports the meter accuracy rules, but that states must enforce those rules thoughtfully, or risk placing onerous requirements on a nascent industry. He added that he hasn’t seen much evidence that there are wide-scale problems with electric meter inaccuracy on chargers.

“You could potentially have chargers being tagged by a field inspector as being out of service, just based on some network glitch that is able to be remotely fixed, and then require a field inspector to go back out again to retest it,” Cohen said. “It’s all needless delays and downtime for chargers that drivers are trying to charge at.”

‘More carrots and less sticks’

In mid-April, Hartmann said he found a charger in Columbia blocked off by signs stating it had been “condemned” by the Agriculture Department. This week, the charger was still closed.

When it comes to EV charger reliability, Cohen said he sees a need for “more carrots and less sticks.” He thinks that charger manufacturers have an intrinsic motivation to keep their chargers running, and compete with titans like Tesla.

“I understand that legislators are responding to constituent frustration about some chargers that don’t provide the experience that we want them to,” Cohen said. “The industry itself is evolving, and competing to improve its products and services and address those concerns.”

State legislators said they plan to return to the drawing board next year — and they have a plan for trimming the bill’s fiscal note.

This year’s bill called for a website that would publish chargers’ functionality in real time, which added a $2 million cost to the bill’s fiscal note. Hettleman said that database was “aspirational,” and may not be included when the bill is revived for the next legislative session.

Del. Nick Allen (D-Baltimore County), who sponsored a companion bill to Hettleman’s in the House, said he’s optimistic that an amended bill would pass next session, particularly given the importance of EV adoption for the state’s climate goals.

“Right now, it’s kind of a Wild West,” Allen said. “If we want to reach our goals of so many zero-emission vehicles being sold in Maryland — if we want to reach all these ambitious climate and emissions related goals, we need to make sure that when people pull off to charge their EV they have the same confidence that they do pulling into a gas station.”

But to opponents, the letter represents a significant change in policy, which compels teachers to restrain their speech about diversity for fear that their schools could lose access to critical federal funding.

The arguments were part of wide-ranging hearing in U.S. District Court for Maryland over a lawsuit by the American Federation of Teachers, its Maryland chapter and the American Sociological Association seeking to block enforcement of the Feb. 14 letter, which says schools that do not comply with civil rights law “face potential loss of federal funding.”

“The government is saying, with its power of the purse: ‘We don’t like diversity, equity and inclusion,’” said Brooke Menschel, a senior attorney at Democracy Forward, who was representing the plaintiffs.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher did not rule Friday on the request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the government from enforcing its “Dear Colleague” letter, but said she plans to issue a written ruling in the days ahead. A similar case is unfolding in New Hampshire, where a federal judge heard arguments Thursday from the government, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Association. That judge is also yet to rule.

On Friday, Gallagher peppered each side with questions on a number of grounds. Did teachers have standing to challenge rules directed at school districts and states? What type of action exactly did the letter constitute? And therefore, what procedural rules did the government have to follow in order to issue it?

At one point, Gallagher probed about how the “Dear Colleague” letter may be enforced, asking whether a school could come under investigation simply because one student reported feeling troubled by classroom discussions about the historical actions of a particular racial group.

“Some people are more sensitive to discussions in a classroom setting than others,” Gallagher said. “Where does that line get drawn?”

Abhishek Kambli, a Justice Department attorney, said the letter was not meant to police such classroom discussions. It was meant to address situations in which students are classified based on race, he said. He highlighted “privilege walks,” wherein participants are categorized based on advantages and disadvantages they’ve faced because of their backgrounds.

He argued that the Civil Rights Act already disallows such activities because they are discriminatory, even though the discrimination may victimize students who comprise a majority group rather than a minority.

“It’s highly unlikely that they’re going to go after a school because they taught a certain book,” Kambli said. “All this letter does is just clarify what the existing obligations are under Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

“They’re trying to make the letter into something that it’s not,” Kambli said of plaintiffs.

But Menschel said that the department, through the letter, was “putting its thumb on the scale of a particular perspective,” causing reasonable teachers to fear reprisal because of particular classroom lessons, and thereby creating a chilling effect on school speech.

One passage in the letter says that “educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.”

Menschel also pointed to the department’s creation of an online portal titled “End DEI,” through which community members can report instances of discrimination.

“The name of the portal itself points to exactly their perspective, and they are trying very hard to coerce people into sharing their views — and doing so under threat of withholding funds,” Menschel said.

But Kambli argued the portal’s name was just evidence that the department has a new priority in enforcing existing civil rights law: Rooting out discrimination occurring under the guise of “DEI.”

“It is perfectly allowable for the government to have a portal that’s aimed at that particular enforcement priority,” Kambli said.

A portion of Friday’s hearing focused on whether the teachers’ groups and the American Sociological Association had legal standing to file suit and seek a preliminary injunction.

Kambli argued that the Department of Education does not directly regulate individual teachers or school administrators, but rather school districts. The teachers would have to show that they sustained a direct harm from the Feb. 14 letter in order to have standing in court, he said.

But the department has yet to open an investigation focused on something like classroom speech, Kambli said, so the educators’ fears are only hypothetical in nature.

“If they’re censoring based off of something that the DCL [Dear Colleague letter] does not say is disallowed, then that harm is self-inflicted,” he said.

In March, the department announced that it had opened investigations into dozens of colleges and universities stemming from the Dear Colleague Letter. A department news release said 45 of the schools came under investigation because they were participating in “The Ph.D Project,” which the release called “an organization that purports to provide doctoral students with insights into obtaining a Ph.D. and networking opportunities, but limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”

Six schools came under investigation for “allegedly awarding impermissible race-based scholarships,” and one is being investigated for “allegedly administering a program that segregates students on the basis of race.”

Although none of those investigations focus on classroom speech in particular, Menschel said they provide a “relevant and important backdrop” for assessing teachers’ concerns that their own classroom conversations about diversity could result in their schools being penalized by the department.

To combat claims that the issuance of the Feb. 14 letter may have violated procedural rules, including by not offering an opportunity for public comment before implementation, Kambli argued that the department only issued the letter as a courtesy to schools. The department could have started investigating instances if considered problematic applications of DEI under existing law, he said.

“We didn’t have to provide any of this anyway,” Kambli said. “We did that to put the schools on as much notice as possible.”

But, Menschel asked, if the Dear Colleague letter didn’t represent a change in policy, why did the department pull “hundreds of pages” of prior civil rights guidance documents from its public-facing website?

Kambli argued that new presidential administrations are allowed to rescind Dear Colleague letters from prior administrations, calling it a “common practice.”

Menschel also said the department’s requirement that school systems certify their compliance with the letter indicates that it is a policy change. The plaintiffs asked Gallagher to pause enforcement of the letter as well as the certification requirement.

Gallagher said the latter request gave her pause, because the certification process was not mentioned in the plaintiffs’ original complaint, which focused entirely on the letter because the certification process had yet to be issued by the department.

“I’m struggling with the fact that I am being asked to enter a preliminary injunction with something that is not mentioned anywhere in the complaint,” Gallagher said.

But Menschel pushed back, arguing that the certification process is a continuation of the letter itself.

“The department is just recycling the letter, in a way, and taking another step toward implementation,” Menschel said.

In a 53-page filing with the U.S. District Court for Maryland — at least 14 pages of which is a listing of defendants — the New Jersey-based company is seeking an order that would let it access the properties with a minimum of 24 hours notice, and prohibit the property owners from interfering.

In its filing, the company said that despite “numerous real and bona fide efforts” to obtain consent from landowners, each has refused.

“Despite our efforts to engage with property owners and even offer reasonable compensation, we have been unable to gain voluntary access from a sufficient number of property owners that will allow us to conduct these environmental surveys,” PSEG said in an April 9 public statement, which also warned that lawsuits could be coming.

The company said it had offered financial compensation to landowners who allowed temporary access for the “noninvasive environmental surveys.” But it said in the filing that an “organized and funded opposition, led by STOP MPRP, Inc.” has “urged property owners to refuse the company access.”

The group was convened last year, after community members first learned of the power line project, known as the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, and grew concerned that the 67-mile power transmission line would destroy tracts of rural land in Baltimore, Carroll and Frederick counties.

The all-volunteer organization is funded entirely by donations and membership payments, said Joanne Frederick, a co-founder and president of the board of directors.

“People have the right to say no when someone wants to come on their land,” Frederick said. “And as an organization, we made people aware of their rights to say no.”

Frederick called Tuesday’s court filing from PSEG “another attack” on local landowners, who were startled to learn of PSEG’s plans for the line, and the possibility that it could use eminent domain to acquire land.

“PSEG wants to come onto people’s properties to do surveys, so they can use that information to strengthen their application, to then later come and take our land,” Frederick said. “Do we, as landowners, have to make it easier for someone to take our land?”

STOP MPRP said Wednesday evening that it had retained legal counsel “to advise our organization on the best course of action to support our members and affected landowners,” and it urged Gov. Wes Moore to issue a public statement in support of the landowners.

Frederick said distrust for PSEG abounds in the community, and some residents are concerned that the surveys could do damage to their properties — or that the data gathered could be distorted to suit PSEG’s needs.

PSEG is completing the surveying — including forest, wetland and sensitive species assessments — as part of its application before the Maryland Public Service Commission for the power line, filed in December. The commission, which regulates utilities in the state, must issue a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity before the project can go forward.

Only after PSC approval could the company seek to use eminent domain. In a prior public statement, the company called it an “option of last resort,” adding that it would only be used “to maintain reliable electric infrastructure for all Marylanders.”

The transmission line was commissioned by PJM Interconnection, the electric grid operator serving Maryland and 12 other states, as well as Washington, D.C. It would connect a Baltimore Gas & Electric right-of-way in northern Baltimore County to the Doubs Substation in Frederick County.

PJM has said it commissioned the Piedmont line, along with other transmission projects, to account for increased energy demand, including from power-hungry data centers like the ones in Northern Virginia, and the loss of energy supply thanks to retiring fossil fuel generators.

In its legal filing, PSEG said it is obligated, under an agreement with PJM, to bring the power line into service by June 2027, and to do so, it must begin construction by January 2026.

If the court does not grant access for the surveying, PSEG would be forced to redraw the power line route, and resubmit its application with the Maryland PSC, the company said. But a different route may not change the outcome, because of the significant community pushback, PSEG said.

“Based on public comments and correspondence the Company has received to date, it is likely that the Company would encounter additional opposition with any alternative proposed line,” reads the lawsuit. “This, in turn, would likely put the Company in exactly the same position in which it finds itself now: seeking Court intervention.”

So far, PSEG has paid nearly $1.6 million to siting and environmental consultants, and $1.3 million to a real estate firm helping contact relevant property owners, according to the company’s lawsuit. Resubmitting an application would likely require the company to incur those fees all over again, and jeopardize the project’s timeline, the suit stated.

Frederick said that PSEG is essentially “asking landowners to either give up and just allow this to happen, or hire what could be very costly attorneys to protect their own land rights,” adding that the impacted property owners include elderly individuals, and some who have never been involved in legal proceedings before.

“We’re standing together. People are resolute. I do not believe that this latest foray will suddenly cause people to just give up,” Frederick said.

Frederick, who lives on a farm property impacted by the route, said she is one of the landowners who was sued earlier this week. If the power line is constructed, she said that she stands to lose about 5 acres of forest on her property, which contains conservation and forest buffer easements.

She purchased the property in 2020. It was a one-time dairy farm, once owned by her great-grandparents, that was sold out of the family in 2004 and fell into disrepair. For the past five years, Frederick said she has been working to restore the farm and her family’s legacy.

But PSEG’s project threatens to upend that, she said. That’s why she has thrown herself into the opposition effort, she said.

“It has been all-consuming,” Frederick said.

That is the main finding of a new report on PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that distributes power in Maryland, the District of Columbia and 12 other states, stretching from the mid-Atlantic to parts of Illinois.

The report, released Tuesday by a national environmental nonprofit, predicts that Maryland households could see an average of $546 in annual savings on their electric bills from 2025 to 2040, with savings peaking at $1,006 a year in 2036 over current practices. The report, by Massachusetts-based research and consulting firm Synapse, predicts that bills across PJM will grow by 60% between now and 2036 with no change in policies; with the changes, bills would actually decrease by 7% in that period.

“Folks probably don’t know much about PJM or what this organization is doing behind the scenes, but it’s about to hit their pocketbooks,” said Charles Harper, senior policy lead for the power sector at Evergreen Collaborative, the environmental nonprofit that commissioned the report.

“So, we wanted to look at what PJM has done to contribute to this problem, by not adding new energy projects efficiently to the electric grid, and to really look forward and look proactively at what reforms we could do now,” he said.

It’s not just PJM. Harper said grid operators around the country are feeling the pinch of a “new paradigm.”

“Historically, maybe a few large power plants would be in the queue and would need to be studied. But now, a hundred smaller solar, wind and storage projects are in the queue instead,” Harper said.

The slow pace of approvals is no longer suitable in a world where the demand for energy is soaring, driven by data centers that require massive amounts of power, including those in Northern Virginia, a data center hotbed. Between 2025 and 2040, energy load growth is expected to increase by 72%, and data centers will account for the majority of that increase.

“That status quo of approving projects slowly is no longer tenable because it’s starting to lead to massive cost increases,” Harper said.

However, studies have shown that PJM is particularly slow. A February 2024 scorecard from GridLab handed PJM a grade of D-minus, the worst of the seven grid operators studied. Tuesday’s study indicated that PJM has had 64 energy projects, which together account for 5 gigawatts of production, in its queue since 2020 or earlier. PJM’s board has estimated that the region could face capacity shortages as soon as the 2026-2027 delivery year.

The report comes as Maryland customers are bracing for increases as high as $18 a month in their residential electric bills this summer, depending on their utility, according to another Synapse study, this time commissioned by the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel. The increases are the result of a record-breaking electricity auction last summer by PJM, that set prices for power beginning June 1, 2025.

Maryland lawmakers, spurred by complaints of already rising utility bills, approved sweeping energy reform legislation in the just-ended General Assembly session, which included redirecting an energy efficiency fund into refunds for Maryland ratepayers in fiscal 2026. Those refunds are expected to average about $80 per household.

The main goal of the legislation, which is awaiting Gov. Wes Moore’s signature, was to expedite state-level approvals for new power facilities, for everything from nuclear and solar to natural gas and battery storage. Even then, however, Maryland is still beholden to PJM, which must assess every utility-scale energy project before it can come onto the grid, determining whether transmission upgrades are needed to accommodate new projects, from solar arrays to wind turbines and battery storage.

Maryland Energy Secretary Paul Pinsky said during a virtual news conference Tuesday that PJM is “one of the largest obstacles” to achieving Maryland’s clean-energy goals and lower customer bills.

“For too long, PJM has caved to the interests of fossil fuel generators and utilities that profit from high electricity prices and scarce new generation,” Pinsky said. “That’s, in my opinion, why PJM has slow-walked reforms that would lower prices.”

Pinsky said he does not believe Maryland should leave PJM, but called on the member states to pressure the grid operator to speed up interconnection.

In a statement, PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields said the grid operator began “significant interconnection process reform in July 2023” that has already trimmed the backlog, with additional approvals coming soon.

“In 15 months, PJM relieved the interconnection backlog by 60% and placed more than 6 [gigawatts] of new generation into service,” Shields wrote.

Shields added that the “significantly higher prices in PJM’s last capacity auction confirmed concerns that we had been calling out over the past two years — that the supply/demand balance has been tightening.”

PJM’s reforms included streamlining “Surplus Interconnection Service,” allowing new energy projects to come online at points where the facility does not run continuously — battery storage beside a renewable energy project, for example. PJM also got approval to start a “Reliability Resource Initiative,” fast-tracking up to 50 “shovel-ready” projects.

But critics, including Pinsky, argue that the criteria for the initiative favor natural gas, rather than renewable energy projects.

“PJM promotes their Reliability Resource Initiative, which fast-tracked projects like gas plants. Many projects in the queue are solar paired with storage. Why aren’t these fast-tracked?” Pinsky asked.

Tuesday’s study called on PJM to embrace additional reforms, including a requirement from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that grid operators complete new-project reviews in 150 days. PJM pushed back against that requirement in a filing with the FERC. The study also said PJM needs to update its understanding of battery storage from its current outdated assumption that “energy storage will charge during peak and require associated transmission upgrades.”

The Evergreen report’s best-case modeling included some items that PJM said it is already pursuing, such as a “first-ready, first-served” process that prioritizes approval for projects that could be operational sooner, as well as a clustered approach, where projects can be considered as a group, rather than one by one.

The study predicts that carbon dioxide emissions would fall 14% if PJM completes the reforms, which it assumes would lead to an increase in renewable energy generation — even though it concedes that the reforms could lead to approval of new gas-fired power plants.

“We are not hiding those results, even though we think that better options are available for people and the climate — and for ratepayers,” Harper said.

The biggest beneficiary of the reforms would be battery storage, which the report’s computer model predicted would increase by 59 gigawatts compared with the status quo scenario. But new gas combined-cycle units came in second with 25 gigawatts, and onshore wind took third place with 8 gigawatts.

After a recent appeal led by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, and backed by Moore, PJM has pledged to lower the cap set for the next two annual auctions, thereby lowering rates for customers.

PJM has also made a change regarding Maryland coal plants.

Talen Energy had planned to close two Maryland plants, coal-fired Brandon Shores and oil-fueled H.A. Wagner, but PJM required them to keep running to meet electricity demand, under a “reliability must run” agreement. Those plants will continue operating past their June 1, 2025, closure dates, with Baltimore Gas & Electric ratepayers footing the bill.

But the energy to be provided by the two plants was not accounted for in PJM’s record-breaking energy auction last summer, raising prices further. In effect, BGE customers are paying for Brandon Shores and Wagner twice: once because of the auction and again because they will pay the plants to run.

After pushback surrounding the auction, PJM said it will include RMR agreements in future auction calculations. Had Brandon Shores and Wagner been included, BGE customers would see a $5.50 per month increase starting in June — rather than a $16 monthly increase, on average.

In a filing Monday, the Office of People’s Counsel asked FERC to give BGE ratepayers a reprieve — or give them a refund if a ruling comes after June.

“PJM ran a flawed auction resulting in prices that—unless corrected—will cost Maryland residential electric customers hundreds of dollars per year in unreasonable and unnecessary capacity costs,” Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp said in a statement. “We are asking FERC to undo those unjust results.”