A Maryland-based company that manages mobile home communities faces more than $1 million in penalties for pollution and other violations at four privately owned wastewater treatment plants that discharge into the Patuxent River and its tributaries.
Horizon Land Management will pay a total of $1.1 million under consent agreements reached recently with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The federal agency cited discharge, reporting and operational violations at plants treating wastewater from four mobile home communities in the Harwood and Lothian areas of western Anne Arundel County.
Headquartered in Crofton, Horizon manages more than 170 manufactured home communities in 19 states, according to its website. The company contracted the operation of the wastewater plants serving the four Anne Arundel communities.
The EPA alleged that, from 2019 through most of 2023, each of the four plants had from 33 to 194 discharge exceedances, releasing wastewater with elevated levels of suspended solids, organic matter, nitrogen and potentially disease-causing e coli bacteria. The plant operators also failed to submit multiple required reports over the years, the agency said, and failed during that time to fix inoperative or malfunctioning equipment.
Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman, who had pressed the EPA to investigate problems with the wastewater plants, called the enforcement action “historic.” It comes, he said, “after years of trying to get the EPA to pay attention to it.” At one point, Tutman said, the agency’s Mid-Atlantic regional office misplaced the paperwork he had submitted.
“It’s been a death march,” he said of the effort to get regulators to crack down on the treatment plants serving Boone’s Estates, Lyons Creek, Maryland Manor and Patuxent mobile home communities.
Two of the communities are along Sands Road, a narrow, two-lane road through a semi-rural area that Tutman has called an environmental justice “sacrifice zone” because residents there have lived for decades with air and water pollution, as well as noise and heavy truck traffic from sand and gravel mines and waste disposal facilities. Tutman and some residents have waged an up-and-down campaign to curb impacts from one facility permitted since 1967 to mine and produce concrete.
In December 2022, an Anne Arundel County hearing officer had ordered Westport Reclamation to cease all commercial operations after determining that little if any mining was still going on there and the property was instead being used to store unregistered vehicles and to dump debris. But the county’s Board of Appeals overturned that decision, ruling that Tutman and a Sands Road resident who had challenged the operations lacked legal standing to do so because neither lived next door to it.
Tutman’s complaints about pollution from the wastewater plants proved similarly contentious, but finally bore fruit. The facilities were inspected in 2016 and 2020 by the Maryland Department of the Environment and in December 2020 by the EPA. In their visits to two plants, EPA inspectors reported seeing solids and brown scum on the surface of supposedly treated wastewater near where it was being discharged into Patuxent tributaries.
Tutman, meanwhile, sent private lab reports to the EPA showing elevated e coli bacteria levels in discharge samples he had tested. A private wastewater contractor who helped Tutman collect the samples was charged with trespassing after the mobile park management filed a complaint, but a District Court judge dismissed the charge.
In related administrative orders, the EPA has directed Horizon and its plant operators to submit a preventive maintenance plan within 30 days, followed in a few months by a plan and timetable to repair and upgrade each facility so it will no longer violate its discharge limits.
Molly Boyle, a spokesperson for Horizon, issued a statement saying the company “has been vigilant to ensure that each of the permit holders are working with the EPA and the Maryland Department of Environment regarding the properties in Lothian, MD, and that they will continue to significantly invest to meet compliance requirements at the properties, and to monitor and comply with all regulations.”
In 2021, Chris Phipps, then Anne Arundel County’s public works director said his staff was evaluating the feasibility of taking over and upgrading the plants — possibly with state funding — by either managing them directly or through a contractor.
Boyle said the county is “still set to take over operation of these wastewater systems at a future date.”
But Karen Henry, who has succeeded Phipps as Anne Arundel public works director, said “it is too early to determine if the county is going to assume ownership and operating control of the private facilities serving the mobile home communities.” She said county officials are still evaluating it “from a technical and environmental standpoint, as well as affordability, funding, legal, and planning and zoning.”