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DENTON — At the February 3 County Commissioners meeting, Commission President Travis Breeding said he wants two things: to establish a clear ban on household trash burning, and to create a simple process for the commission to impose wider bans in unsafe circumstances.
Breeding and Stewart Barroll, the county’s attorney, discovered that there are discrepancies in state and local code documents on whether household trash burning is allowed in Caroline. Barroll stated that in COMAR (the Code of Maryland Regulations), Caroline County is listed as a county where trash burning is permissible. However, Maryland’s fire prevention regulations do not allow any household trash burning across the state. These regulations preempt COMAR.
“There are areas where I would say I don’t doubt that the state probably goes further than I’d like to go, like if you want to burn yard waste I have no problem with that. As long as you’re not doing it right on the property line,” Breeding said, “but we don’t really see a lot of complaints around that issue so I don’t really feel it necessary to delve into all those nuances.” Breeding said if it is going to take a legislative move by the state to give the County Commissioners the authority to impose a clear-cut burn ban, then he is willing to talk with local representatives about the issue. “Burning trash, I want to ban that, and I think this board should have the ability to institute a burn ban in periods of extreme drought… I don’t want to get a million pages of state fire regulations that we’re enforcing.”
Commissioner Larry Porter added that while he knows the majority of Caroline Countians grew up with trash burning barrels as the norm, “We don’t want controlled burns to turn into uncontrolled burns.”
“I just want a simple process,” Breeding said, “as much control locally as we can have, we need to impose that control over this simple issue.”
