St. Mary’s County commissioners have handed over management of more than $368,000 in accumulated environmental fees to a Maryland nonprofit, with the money earmarked for tree planting projects meant to offset development along the county’s waterways.
The Sept. 1 vote approved a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chesapeake Bay Trust to administer $368,111.25 in what the county calls critical area fee-in-lieu funds. That money didn’t come from taxes — it’s built up over time from property owners who couldn’t meet their tree-replanting obligations after disturbing land within Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Critical Area, the zone covering all land within 1,000 feet of tidal waters and wetlands, established under state law in 1984.
Under the Critical Area program, any development or vegetation clearing within that zone — especially within the mandatory 100-foot buffer closest to the water — generally requires the property owner to replant trees and shrubs to offset what was removed. But not every site has room for that. When on-site planting isn’t feasible, the county allows applicants to instead pay a fee based on the square footage of required mitigation — a rate documented in at least one past county variance case at $1.50 per square foot — and find an off-site planting location later, or let the county handle it. Over time, those individual fees add up into a fund the county is now required to actually spend on real tree plantings, rather than let sit unused.
That’s where the Chesapeake Bay Trust comes in. The nonprofit already administers similar tree-planting and community grant partnerships on behalf of several other Maryland counties, including Charles, Anne Arundel, Howard, and Prince George’s — typically handling grant applications, review, and disbursement so county staff don’t have to run the program directly. The Trust ties much of its tree-planting work to Maryland’s statewide commitment to plant 5 million native trees by 2031, and generally requires trees funded through its grants to be logged in the state’s official tree-tracking system.
For St. Mary’s County, the new agreement means the roughly $368,000 collected from Critical Area mitigation shortfalls over time can now flow out as grants for actual planting projects, managed by an organization with an established track record running comparable programs elsewhere in the state.
