All around the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, Mike Hallmen points to evidence that change is afoot.
Water-filled chambers that were once clogged with mucky brown sediment or choked by vegetation now run clear. Construction crews repair the concrete wall of a massive circular tank. Below the golden egg-shaped domes of the digesters, perhaps the most recognizable landmark at the plant, bulldozers circle as rehab work continues in earnest.
It’s been over two years since Maryland’s largest wastewater treatment plant reached a low point. In March of 2022, the state directed a team from the Maryland Environmental Service to “take charge” of the plant, which was considered at risk of “catastrophic failures.”
The now-terminated arrangement, which cost the city about $7 million, kickstarted improvements, said Hallmen, the deputy bureau head of wastewater at the Baltimore City Department of Public Works. But the effort, which has brought the plant and its sister plant on the Patapsco River back into compliance with their discharge limits into local rivers, was city-led, Hallmen said.
“The thing that makes me the most proud is it that it really was city-driven efforts that got us to where we are today,” he said. “We were always responsible for the plant. We were always responsible for our permit.”
State inspections revealed the plant had fallen into disrepair as the coronavirus pandemic raged, and key equipment had clogged with sewage, meaning the water flowing from the facility into Baltimore County’s Back River often exceeded limits for bacteria and nutrients, which stimulate the growth of oxygen-depleting algae blooms. At the city’s Patapsco plant, a painfully similar story unfolded.
Top city officials appeared complacent, according to an Environmental Service report, while undersized teams of plant operators seemed demoralized.
The problems resulted in a $4.75 million penalty and consent decree for the city, obligating millions more in equipment repairs at the two facilities. As of mid-November, the city has poured $154 million into repairs at the Back River plant, alongside $88 million for Patapsco, according to a consent decree report. The costs are part of the reason for a proposed sewer rate increase for city residents in the year ahead.
The problems also gave fuel to long-running (and ongoing) discussions about regional — rather than municipal — management of Baltimore’s major water infrastructure.
At recent public meetings, Hallmen points to line graphs showing monthly nitrogen and phosphorus levels below limits set by the state, after some overages this spring amid rainy weather, which can drastically increase the amount of water for the plants to treat, thanks to an aged sewer system that lets rainwater in.
But at least one question remains unanswered: Can it last?
Alice Volpitta, Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper for nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore, isn’t so confident yet. For one thing, the facility has faced an easier than average year, given dry conditions.
“We haven’t really seen the system be tested to its limits because we’re currently in a drought situation,” Volpitta said. “That’s good news for water quality. But it means that we still have to wait and see whether or not the system is resilient.”
Years ago, it was sampling from Blue Water that brought public awareness to the issues at the plants. Some faulted the Maryland Department of the Environment, which is tasked with monitoring wastewater plants and a host of other facilities, for not catching the violations before they began to mount.
The situation was a lesson for state regulators, said Lee Currey, director of MDE’s Water and Science Administration. Since then, the agency has implemented an “early-warning system,” which trigger alerts when any of the states 70 large wastewater plants run substantially afoul of their environmental permits.
The system prompted a notification to the city in July, said MDE spokesman Jay Apperson, citing elevated nitrogen levels at the Patapsco plant between January and April, amid a spate of wet weather. MDE officials met with the city in August, and monthly average nitrogen concentrations were compliant from May through October.
Currey said both of the city’s plants have come a long way, and are on track for continued compliance.
“I’m happy to say the consent decree has been a success,” Currey said. “It’s good to celebrate the achievement that we’ve seen, but there definitely still remains some work that needs to be done.”
The city is battling a persistent staffing crisis, and employing private contractors to run entire sections of the facility, which comes with an upcharge. The city’s latest report under the consent decree pointed to $40 million in “staff augmentation” costs.
Union representative Stuart Katzenberg called the privatization inside the plants “unacceptable.” Katzenberg is the director of collective bargaining and growth strategies at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 3, which includes blue-collar city public works employees.
“The city has outsourced too much of its expertise, ” Katzenberg said. ‘We will continue to work with partners — and fight when necessary — to bring operations in-house.”
Katzenberg said the city didn’t do enough to build a pipeline of qualified staff members, and wage raises haven’t brought the city level with nearby utilities, such as DC Water and WSSC Water. The city’s current contract with the union will expire July 1.
After a salary study, the city bumped up wages for staff members, and the Department of Public Works has incurred about $5.6 million in extra costs as a result, according to the November report.
But recruiting staff has remained challenging, Hallmen said. And once they’re on-board, obtaining a required state certification takes, at minimum, three years of training, plus passing a test. So short-term contracting help is still needed.
Some of the problem is industry-wide. There just aren’t many kids who grow up dreaming of working at a wastewater treatment plant, Hallmen said.
“How do we sell that to younger people, and to get them to want to be involved?” Hallmen said.
A plant in repair
The improvements at Back River are perhaps most evident at the primary settling tanks, massive circular basins that separate solid and liquid waste using gravity.
When Hallmen started at the plant in June 2021, he estimates that one and a half of the eleven tanks were in full operation. Photographs from state reports showed tanks choked with sludge, looking closer to muddy baseball fields than the blue-green ponds they are today.
These days, Hallmen says all eleven tanks have been rehabilitated ahead of schedule, even though far fewer are needed for typical daily operations.
“It’s been quite an effort, not just from the amount of investment that’s gone in there, but just the shear amount of work that was needed,” Hallmen said.
The plant-wide problems even impacted the much-heralded new $430 million Headworks facility — a set of buildings and equipment at the beginning of the plant, which employ a pumping system to resolve a bottleneck in the sewer line leading into Back River.
Some HVAC equipment had to be replaced, Hallmen said, because smelly, corrosive sewage gas called hydrogen sulfide built up, after the city couldn’t run its odor control system due to problems elsewhere in the plant.
So far, the city has completed 31 of 40 of the construction projects required by its consent decree with concrete deadlines, according to Hallmen. The city is also replacing an antiquated maintenance tracking system to ensure equipment repairs are made in a timely fashion — before breakdowns occur, he said.
But the ship isn’t necessarily completely righted, said Evan Isaacson, a senior attorney for the Chesapeake Legal Alliance who was involved in the consent decree negotiations and has closely monitored the facilities’ reports ever since.
Since the consent decree began, the city has incurred over $70,000 in fines from MDE for wastewater overflows, potable water spills and sampling violations. The majority of the fines were incurred by Back River.
“The deviations were caused by various factors, including equipment malfunctions, end-of-life equipment failures, and wet weather flows,” said DPW spokesperson Jennifer Combs in a statement.
The total could have climbed above $200,000, but MDE often opted to charge less than the maximum. Currey said the violations, while not as serious as the past problems that led to the consent decree, still warranted fines.
Isaacson said he’s encouraged that MDE is penalizing the violations. But the fact that there are violations at all means the plants likely aren’t always as high-functioning as the data coming from their discharge pipes indicate.
“The number of stipulated penalties is somewhat concerning, because it’s indicative of potential larger problems in the operation of the plant,” Isaacson said. “It was a very dry year in 2024, and yet there were still a number of spills.”
Hallmen says morale at the plants is also improving, not least because repairs are unfolding.
During the pandemic, equipment orders seemed to take forever, Hallmen said. The state of the plant engendered feelings of helplessness among the plant’s best workers, Hallmen said.
“A lot of our good people were like: ‘What do you want me to do? I can only do so much when I don’t have what I need,’” Hallmen said.
“Burnout was real,” he said.
Residents stay vigilant
Desiree Greaver still remembers that day out on the Back River a few years ago.
Gazing into the water from a boat, Greaver saw thick brown-black clumps of algae rising from the riverbed to the surface.
“We just saw these volcanic eruptions happening all around us. The river floor was just covered in it,” Greaver said. “It was disgusting-looking.”
Greaver was new to her job as a project manager for the Back River Restoration Committee, a nonprofit dedicated to the river. Initially, she thought the clumps were sewage spewing directly from the plant.
State officials determined the material was algae, perhaps a result of excessive nutrients in the water. But regardless, the river was declared unsafe for human contact.
Largely spurred by the events of a few years ago, the Committee has implemented its own biweekly water sampling program during the swimming season, paid for with donor funds. The program has become popular enough that, this summer, when Greaver missed a round of sampling because she was on vacation, she heard from residents who wondered where the results were.
“It puts them at ease. We have no agenda,” she said. “Good, bad — we’re gonna post them.”
This year, there were a few spikes in bacteria readings, which sometimes corresponded with rainy weather, but they never lasted, Greaver said.
But nearby residents remain concerned, largely by the persistent odors that waft around their neighborhoods — and seem to worsen as they drive closer to the plant.
“You smell it with your windows up,” Greaver said. “It’ll grab you from the inside. It’s nauseating.”
Since Stephen Higgins moved to the Essex area about 15 years ago, the odors have been a fact of life, he said. But recently, his frustrations drove him to speak out at a community meeting about the facility.
MDE investigated an odor complaint from the plant on Halloween. The agency noted that plant staff were cleaning out the golden honeycombed digesters, a possible cause of the smell, but labeled the investigation as inconclusive.
“They’re saying now they’re up to compliance and the water treatment should be better,” Higgins said. “If that’s the case, why is the smell getting worse?”
Have a news tip? Contact Christine Condon at [email protected], 667-256-6883 and @CChristine19 on X.
