Lone resident’s complaints lead to lawsuit over stream pollution in Maryland town

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” as the saying goes. When it comes to enforcing environmental laws, it can take a lot of squeaking from a lone, concerned citizen to get action.

Returning home in December 2024 from hunting in the woods behind his house in La Plata, MD, Mike Madatic didn’t like the look — or smell — of the stream flowing through his backyard. The water, usually crystal clear, had turned murky gray, and a similarly colored sludge had built up along the banks. He detected a rank sewage-like odor.

Madatic immediately suspected that something had gone wrong at the municipal wastewater treatment plant about a mile upstream of his house. Yet when he contacted the town officials, he said, “their answer was, ‘It’s not our problem.’”

Thus began a nearly year-long ordeal, during which the stream repeatedly turned gray, especially after heavy rain. An unnamed tributary of Port Tobacco Creek, which ultimately flows to the Potomac River, the creek would stay cloudy for days and sometimes weeks afterwards, Madatic said, often emitting whiffs of what smelled to him like sewage.

Every time that happened, Madatic, a retired federal employee, complained to the town and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). He said that town officials either ignored him or told him the wastewater plant was not the source. A state inspector, though, informed him after his first complaint that there had been a “washout” at the plant. But his subsequent emails in spring and summer reporting more episodes of gray, smelly water drew little or no response.

“It was intolerable from my point of view,” Madatic said. “The smell was terrible, and the fact that all that sewage was just going into the Potomac River. It was not good. “We had been putting millions and millions of dollars into the river trying to get it cleaned up. Nobody seemed to care. I care.”

Frustrated, Madatic finally reached out to the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. The nonprofit environmental watchdog group responded by asking him to help collect water samples from the creek upstream and downstream of the treatment plant.

From May through July, Madatic and riverkeeper staff detected “gray water, foam and sewage odors — particularly following storm events,” according to a court filing by the group. On multiple occasions, it added, lab analyses of water sampled by the outfall measured elevated levels of E. coli, a type of bacteria often found in fecal matter.

In July, the Potomac group formally notified the town of its intent to sue, alleging that the treatment plant was violating its state-issued discharge permit and the federal Clean Water Act. A couple of months later, MDE filed its own lawsuit. The state alleged several instances of unreported sewage overflows from the plant both before and during the time Madatic had been complaining, plus a total of 63 exceedances of the facility’s discharge permit going back to 2021 and continuing up to the time of the lawsuit.

MDE spokesman Jay Apperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

The Potomac Riverkeeper Network subsequently filed a motion to intervene in the state’s lawsuit against the town, which was granted.

This is not the first time La Plata’s treatment plant has been in the dock. MDE has cited it repeatedly over the past 20 years for sewage overflows and treatment bypasses that dumped polluted water into local waterways, including the stream that flows past Madatic’s house.

In 2012, the town paid $50,000 in penalties to settle an MDE enforcement action for a series of sewage overflows from 2009 through 2011.

A decade later, it paid another $9,714 for more overflows in the preceding five years.

On some occasions, MDE has let the town off without penalties, instead requiring the installation of new sewer lines or making upgrades to pumping stations. In 2010, after the town failed to meet the state’s deadline for upgrading the plant to reduce nutrient pollution, municipal officials avoided a penalty by signing another consent agreement with MDE to complete the task on a new timeline.

Reached by telephone, Chuck Stevens, the town’s manager, acknowledged overflows and discharge violations at the plant in recent years but said they stemmed from a combination of heavy rains, aging equipment and ongoing upgrades that temporarily limited the facility’s ability to handle storm-swollen flows.

“Obviously, the town wants to be in compliance and maintain compliance,” Stevens said. With repairs and upgrades finished earlier this year, he added, the plant has been “largely in compliance” since summer.

But on July 31 — two days after Stevens told town commissioners the plant was in compliance — an MDE inspector found that the plant’s discharge exceeded permitted limits on certain pollutants through June. The inspector called for corrective actions to clean up the plant site and reduce the likelihood of polluted stormwater running off into the stream. There have been no inspections since.

“We’re working very closely with MDE,” Stevens explained, as well as with the Maryland Environmental Service, a not-for-profit business unit of the state that operates several small municipal wastewater plants and solid waste facilities. The town also hired a private engineering firm to assess the plant’s operation and the source of the violations.

The engineering consultant attributed sewage overflows to leaky sewer lines that allow rainwater in, overwhelming the plant’s treatment capacity. It also said the aging plant, built in 1971, needed extensive repairs, upgrades and replacements.

The town has upgraded the plant before, with state financial assistance, and increased its capacity to treat up to 1.5 million gallons of wastewater daily. It wants to increase that to 2 million gallons daily in the near future to handle expected population growth and development.

“To the town’s credit, they have not been waiting around for the state to take enforcement action to address some of those operational issues,” saidDavid Flores, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network’s vice president and general counsel. But he noted that his group has been pointing out problems and violations at the plant for at least the last decade.

“There’s some big work ahead that needs to be done,” he said, particularly in addressing the leaky sewer lines. The Potomac group is “eager to engage both the state and the town,” he added, “in helping chart a path for longer term compliance.”

Madatic simply wants his clean stream back — now — so he can see fish in it again.

“It’s still ongoing,” he said one day in late December, after emailing MDE about another gray water episode. “The creek is full of sewage. They have not got to the root cause of the problem yet.”

He said he’d like to see MDE do something more than fine the town, such as prohibiting new water and sewer hookups until the plant can operate violation-free for several weeks straight.

Meanwhile, he said, “I’m not going to give up. Every time [the stream water quality] goes south, I’m going to let everybody know about it.”

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