Dear Lovers Of The Severn River:

Your help is urgently needed to protect our forests! On Monday, October 7, the Anne Arundel County Council will debate the Forest Conservation Act (FCA).

The proposed FCA (Bill 68-19) is designed to apply meaningful forest conservation regulations to development rules.

Under current development practices, our county is losing more wooded land than all surrounding Maryland counties combined.

The FCA would help shift development pressure from wooded parcels – which is where nearly all new development currently is taking place – to economically and environmentally beneficial redevelopment projects on existing, paved land.

Our County Council members are under tremendous pressure from development interests to kill this bill and continue the unprecedented bulldozing until virtually every wooded parcel remaining in the watershed is gone.

Your Council Member needs to hear from you this week. Please call or email them and urge them to support the FCA proposal.

Click here to find out who your Council Member is and get their contact information. Call right away! Developers are putting on a well-financed full-court press to defeat this modest proposal.

We also need to pack the County Council chambers this Monday night in a show of forceful support for the FCA.

There is also a Forest Rally at 6 pm just before the meeting.

We hope to see each of you on October 7. An opportunity to finally put sanity into our development process and save our watershed is unlikely to come again soon.

Now is the time to act! Please contact your County Council Members now.

Click here to identify your Council member.

To access an FCA fact sheet from Anne Arundel County, click here.

To access a letter from SRA and the Magothy River Association jointly provided to the County Executive this summer explaining SRA’s no-net-increase-of-impervious-surface stance, click here.

I look forward to seeing you Monday night!

Sincerely,

Jeff Schomig
SRA Board Member and Chair, Advocacy Committee