Waterfront Homeowners Living on the Edge

Bill Gargiulo said he thought he had the right to build a retaining wall in front of his house on the West River south of Annapolis. But it turned out to be illegal, and Anne Arundel County officials are forcing him to remove it. "What we did was wrong, and we will correct it," he says. (By Dayna Smith For The Washington Post)

The idea was to preserve thin strips of grasses, trees and shrubs, which trap excess dirt and filter out pollutants that cause "dead zones." Such plants at shorelines are as crucial to the bay as skin is to people, scientists say.

The strips are "extremely thin," said Margaret Palmer, director of the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. But they are "very, very important."

The same strips are also nice places in which to build gazebos. Every year, homeowners around the state file more than 350 requests for permission to build something in the critical areas.

Environmental groups have denounced the way that such cases are decided. This month, the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation studied variance requests from four counties; an average of 76 percent were approved. That is "death by a thousand cuts" for the state's waterways, the foundation said.

Then there are the cases in which homeowners don't seek permission at all.

The Critical Area Commission says there have been 116 such cases since 2005, most in Anne Arundel, Calvert and St. Mary's counties. Although the commission provides opinions about such cases, officials at the county or city level usually settle them.

Many of the commission's files lack crucial documents -- staffers say that local officials sometimes don't provide them -- but employees say they know the outcome of 81 of the 116 requests. In 67 percent of the 81 cases, the files show, homeowners were granted the right to keep some or all of what they had built.

Serey, the commission's director, said he thinks that is too many.

"I'm certain some of them were innocent," he said. "I'm also certain that most of them were not."

It is difficult to compare Maryland with other jurisdictions. The District does not have a similar rule limiting development near shorelines, said a spokeswoman for the city Department of the Environment. Virginia has a parallel rule, but an official said the state does not track permissions granted after illegal structures have been built.

In Maryland, one of the most widely known after-the-fact cases had to do with the compound that home builder Daryl Wagner constructed on an island in the Magothy River, north of Annapolis. Without seeking critical-area variances, Wagner, beginning in 2000, built a home with a lighthouse tower, pool and gazebo.

Last year, an Anne Arundel appeals board ruled that the house could stay but that other structures had to be demolished. An environmental group appealed, and the case is in the court system.