Important Takeaways:

• Baltimore City agrees to consent decree on wastewater treatment and $4.75 million fine
• More than two years after the discovery of severe pollution coming from its two wastewater treatment plants, Baltimore has agreed to pay a state fine of up to $4.75 million and meet a series of deadlines to make repairs, officials will say Thursday.
• Nearly half of the civil penalty, which is among the largest for water pollution in state history, will fund environmental projects, with a focus on the Patapsco and Back rivers, which received millions of gallons of polluted water from the plants.
• …residents were outspoken in their frustrations after environmental officials declared the river unsafe for human contact in the spring and summer last year, due to pollution from the plant.
• But in recent years, both city-owned plants frequently dumped water that hadn’t been treated adequately, as a short-handed and undertrained staff struggled to address a growing backlog of necessary equipment repairs.
• The violations covered by the consent decree go back as far as 2017, but reached their peak in 2021 and early 2022. During that time, both rivers were inundated with a cocktail of pollutants, including potentially illness-causing bacteria and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus.

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