The Catonsville neighbors of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, say they were blindsided by a $27 million project paid out of a UMBC capital improvement budget that included clear-cutting nearly 3 acres of trees and bulldozing a stream valley and wetlands on the old Spring Grove Hospital Center.
“What a waste of $27 million — the cost of a new school — to destroy extensive forest and stream natural resources and save nothing,” Jim Himel, a retired forester and executive director of the Spring Grove Arboretum organization, told The Baltimore Sun.
In a written statement, UMBC officials acknowledged to The Baltimore Sun that they could have done better outreach.
“Engaging local members of the community in our future planning process is a major priority for our leadership in the UMBC Office of Government Relations and Community Affairs,” the statement reads. The university says its plans include a multi-component tree-protection plan with a survey of “specimen trees” with trunks wider than 30 inches, a one-to-one replacement of cut trees, as well as additional tree plantings, and a five-year commitment to ensuring the new trees’ survival.
In addition to upsetting residents, the project violated state laws protecting wetlands, including Herbert Run and the area fed by an active spring above the creek, according to Maryland Department of the Environment inspection documents obtained by The Sun.
Inspections cited the project for multiple instances of silt fences crushed flat by construction equipment, unstabilized slopes, temporary roads crossing tributaries, construction supplies and equipment parked within the streambed and other lapses leading to increased erosion.
“How can you miss a wetland that’s 2- to 4-acres in size,” Himel said. “Because they didn’t identify wetland boundaries, they ended up running their trucks over tree roots and right above a spring head. In a couple of places, it was so mushy they had to put down matting to keep their trucks from getting stuck.”
Catonsville residents, including current and former officials, said the university failed to reach out to the community before bringing in bulldozers and chainsaws.
The project demolished an area designated by the community as the Spring Grove Arboretum, where neighbors and volunteer organizations helped plant 1,000 trees in 2021 with state funding. In addition to the acres clear-cut along Herbert Run, most of the trees the residents planted around a county ballfield on Wade Avenue were bulldozed for space to park heavy construction equipment and to store piles of building materials. Less than a dozen of the saplings planted by volunteers remain.
UMBC bought the Spring Grove Campus from the State of Maryland for $1 in 2022. The agreement includes a 10-year contract for the state to continue operating the hospital on the site, which can be renewed for two 5-year periods or until Maryland develops replacement facilities elsewhere. In addition to serving voluntary patients and conducting ground-breaking research into schizophrenia, Spring Grove houses court-ordered criminal patients.
UMBC officials told The Sun in an emailed statement school budgeted $27 million in state funding to “restore, stabilize and remediate portions of the site.” Plans the school filed in November 2024 describe work to be performed along more than 4,500 feet of Herbert Run and two unnamed tributaries, as well as repairs to Elm Street.
“As part of this project, we are restoring the West Branch of Herbert Run to reinvigorate many of the site’s natural features and address the negative effects of stream bank erosion, which has contributed to unvegetated, near-vertical stream banks, loss of trees adjacent to the stream, exposure of utilities, and degradation and/or failure of concrete structures within the stream, including bridges,” university officials told The Sun. “We are installing multiple stormwater drainage improvements to stabilize, preserve, and protect the stream, land, and existing buildings from flooding and erosion caused by excessive stormwater runoff. Our work will ensure that the bridges and roadways are safe.”
Herbert Run’s water quality is impaired by “bacteria, ions, metals, nutrients, pesticides, sediment, stream modifications, and toxicity (selenium),” project documents state.
The foresters who spoke to The Sun disputed the school’s characterization of Herbert Run.
Clear-cutting trees and flattening the valley is more likely to degrade the Herbert Run streambed than stabilize it, Himel said.
“It was stable, full of huge trees with trunks over 30 inches in diameter, their root masses armoring the stream banks,” he said. “Why would you cut all those huge trees and open up that whole valley to erosion? They might as well have put a four-lane highway through it, because they changed the entire environment of that stream valley. I don’t think it’s going to hold up when the next heavy rain comes.”
Himel said the stream already runs across bedrock, limiting erosion, and had survived the Beltway development without significant erosion or flooding before this project started.
“I’m rather blown away,” Himel said. “If they’re doing a streambed restoration project here, it seems really unnecessary. Even in 1,000-year floods that wreaked havoc in Ellicott City, the Herbert Run streambed did not leave its channel.”
The contractor also put logs and other debris in wetland areas fed by that spring, licensed forester and Catonsville resident William Rees told The Sun.
“You can’t put fill in a wetland,” he said. “They put fill and logs in the wetland.”
The project flies in the face of regional efforts to save the Chesapeake Bay, Rees said, and no restoration plan can reproduce the natural forested streambed that once existed there.
“This wetland around Herbert Run is ultimately the reason we spend billions of dollars on protecting the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “This riparian forest that grows adjacent to streams is the most highly valued ecosystem in the state.”
Degradation and erosion in streams like Herbert Run ultimately dump silt into the Bay, harming wildlife and shading out the seagrasses that fish, crabs and other species need to survive. Conservationists have identified silt and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen as the biggest threats to the Bay’s health, outstripping the impacts of street drugs and other chemicals seeping into waterways.
The Maryland Department of the Environment visited the construction site at Spring Grove in December and January, issuing more than 30 violations, according to inspection documents reviewed by The Sun.
“We have conducted three recent inspections of the site,” department spokesman Jay Apperson told The Sun. “These inspections found the site to be out of compliance with environmental regulations, and they included directions for corrective actions. We continue to monitor the activities there to see that the site comes into compliance.”
Many of those violations remained uncorrected as of a Jan. 15 inspection, but work continues in Herbert Run, as The Sun recorded by flying a drone over the snowy site.
Heart of the Community
The wholesale demolition of the Spring Grove Arboretum hit home to community volunteers who helped plant 1,000 tree seedlings around a new county ballfield in August of 2021. The long-term arboretum effort included public-service volunteer efforts by local Boy Scouts, soldiers from Fort Meade, UMBC fraternities and sororities and public officials, including Dels. Sheila Ruth and Eric Ebersole, and retired judge Susan Souder, an active leader with the Catonsville Tree Canopy Project.
Within days of their 2021 planting, a county contractor mowed many of them down, according to news reports, despite multiple signs saying “Tree Preservation Area, Keep Out.”
This winter’s bullcozing and tree cutting by UMBC came as a total shock and a disappointment, Souder told The Sun.
“I’ve been devastated personally, seeing some of our hard work being undone,” she said. “There’s been no outreach of which I’m aware. I’ve heard nothing about what their plans are. … We just had really high hopes for a long time that the state would realize how important this property is in the heart of Catonsville. It provides so much value to our community. A lot of people live in Catonsville because we enjoy being outdoors.”
Souder said she hopes the university will work harder to incorporate the input and efforts of local tree enthusiasts like her, for the benefit of the community and the campus.
“I think everybody in Maryland can be proud of UMBC,” she said. “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t be open to a nonprofit volunteer organization like ours providing an arboretum. To me, it seems so obvious how it would benefit UMBC, their students and visitors.”
Have a news tip? Contact Karl Hille at 443-900-7891 or khille@baltsun.com.