A decades-long frustration with septic systems across Caroline County has finally yielded a breakthrough agreement across the county and several towns. The new sewage treatment facility is being targeted to serve residents of Greensboro and Goldsboro, and to alleviate hundreds of failing septic systems.
From coverage in the Bay Journal:
The arrangement is somewhat original, and Maryland Department of the Environment Senior Policy Advisor Lynn Y. Buhl said that she hoped to use it as a model for cooperation in other areas that might have to tackle these issues. While the Greensboro plant is 50 years old and frequently overwhelmed by storms, the towns of Goldsboro, Marydel, Henderson and Templeville have no treatment at all.
In Goldsboro, the wastewater flowed into the town’s ditches, which eventually reached the Choptank River. But first, the water entered Lake Bonnie, a man-made recreational lake on a popular campsite that was forced by the Caroline County Health Department to close in 1996 because of pollution.
For more than a decade, county commissioners and local mayors have tried to incorporate a solution that would also address the septic woes of Henderson, Marydel and Templeville. Each of those towns has about 100 residents; in Marydel, residents on one side of the street live in Maryland; residents on the other side live in Delaware. Like Goldsboro, the mayors in these towns are volunteers, the budgets are small, and the residents are far from wealthy. All previous solutions would have required billing the residents far more than they could have afforded.
