Pealiquor Road storm water management project nears completion

WILLISTON – A much-needed project to solve flooding issues on Pealiquor Road north of Williston is nearing completion, and state and local officials visited the site Thursday, June 4, 2026, to witness the progress.

Around noon, local officials joined Maryland Department of the Environment Secretary Serena McIlwain to survey the project. With her were District 37B representatives State Sen. Johnny Mautz and Del. Tom Hutchinson, Caroline County Commission President Travis Breeding, County Administrator Katheleen Freeman, Deputy Administrator Daniel Fox, as well as Planning and Codes Director Crystal Dadds and Assistant Director of Planning Leslie Grunden.

The project, scheduled to be finished at the end of June, is designed to mitigate longtime and worsening impacts from stormwater runoff, including flooding and erosion, and will reduce nutrient and sediment impacts to water quality.

“I'm delighted that we have the attention of the Secretary of MDE down here to see what's good in Caroline County, and where we need some help in terms of wastewater management,” Hutchinson said.

McIlwain voiced her approval of the project. “With climate change, we're seeing increased flooding, and we're seeing how neighborhoods are impacted by the increased flooding, and that is why projects like this wetland project and storm water management (are) so critical,” she said. “That is why we at MDE were very happy to fund this program.”

Douglas Krauss owns the 200-acre River Bend Farm just north of the village of Williston and donated about 1.25 acres of land for the project.

Krauss’s motivation for donating the land “was twofold,” he said. “I wanted to be able to help with lowering the effluence going into the Choptank because today we have otter and eagles and freshwater mussels. When I was a kid here, we didn't have any of that, so we're moving in the right direction. I just wanted to keep going in the right direction, so it's an acre-and-a-quarter of 200 acres. That's not much of a sacrifice to do the right thing.”

A series of bioswales, check dams and constructed wetland will slow and filter runoff from Williston subdivisions and farmland before it reaches Wheelbarrow Creek and the Choptank River. It’s designed to handle large volumes of storm water that will meander through a series of check dams to a pond at the other end, slowing down the rush of water to the river that blows out stream banks and roads.

After stormwater enters the new drainage area, “it'll begin to spread out, and in the shallower areas, there'll be different wetland vegetation, which will use some of the nutrients and trap some of the sediment,” said Eric Buell, a watershed restoration specialist with the University of Maryland Sea Grant Extension, one of the project partners providing grant assistance and outreach. He is headquartered at the Wye Research and Education Center in Queenstown.  

“So, instead of just a straight shot through, the (constructed wetland) is going to increase the time that the water has to be in here,” Buell said.  

The project that began before the Covid pandemic was put on hold but  revived in 2021. “The dilemma was increasingly large volumes of storm water with increased rainfall amounts and more development,” Grunden said.

“We had extreme flooding, runoff, erosion and road damage from increased rainfall amounts over the last few years,” Grunden said. A Williston subdivision “was built before modern stormwater regs, and the road was getting over-topped with storm water runoff, and it was sitting on these properties that have septic drain fields – some as much as a foot of water in their yards.”

This is the second community-scale project Planning and Codes has spearheaded. The first was in Jonestown, and the next will be the Trinity subdivision south of Ridgely.

At the Pealiquor Road project, “drain fields were getting impacted, road infrastructure was getting impacted, and the public works department was struggling to find a solution,” Grunden said. “This is an old road, an old ditch system, very little right of way – so trying to get the water to a point (or pipe), and the volume of water we needed to be able to handle was a challenge.”

“So the dilemma was getting the water off of properties, but where do you put the water, which is the eternal challenge for storm water projects,” she said. “(With) a subdivision or a residential area that had these kinds of problems, you're generally limited to solving them on each small parcel, and then you somehow have to connect them.”

A solution only “dreamed about” was finding “a farmer who'd be willing to let us do a large practice that would handle … all of the runoff coming from these areas, and some ag runoff too,” she said.

Caroline County Department of Public Works hired an engineer to come up with a solution, and as they were conferring on Pealiquor Road, Krauss approached them to ask what they were doing. Grunden said, “They explained the problem and the challenge they had trying to figure out where to put that volume of water, and Doug said – this is a miracle – ‘You're welcome to use an acre or two of my land, as long as you do a green practice.”

“I mean, it was serendipity,” Grunden said. “It's hard to do a community scale storm water project without that available land area. The hero here is really Doug Krauss.”

Krauss has witnessed the storm water dilemma firsthand his entire life. He was just a boy when his father, chair of the former botany department at the University of Maryland, bought the property in 1959.

Dr. Robert Krauss, was “restoring the forest to its original state, and the runoff was causing a problem in a conservation dam we had built back in the 80s,” Krauss said. “It was silting in, and then it became undermined because heavy rains would come ripping through what was a very small stream.”

Krauss said the project means “a lot of sentimental things” to him.

“My father would be very glad that this is being done, because it does protect the property, and my brother bought this 40-acre lot here and was going to build there and was tragically killed shortly thereafter, and he always wanted to put a pond here or a lake,” he said. “Being able to pick the trees and the shrubs and the plants – that's just right up dad’s alley.”

Once the County had Krauss’s buy-in, designing the project could begin, and multiple partners also joined in. The Chesapeake Bay Trust funded that design process. About halfway through that process, the Department of Planning and Codes reached out to Greg Sandi, chief of the MDE’s Watershed Restoration Planning Division.

“It's wonderful to have that synergy, where you have the private-public partnerships to get things like this done,” Sandi said.

“One of the biggest things we were trying to do here is deal with the flooding, and so being able to do water quality on top of flooding mitigation is always a benefit,” Sandi said. “One of the things that we've been really focused on is trying to maximize what we call co-benefits, so the more you can make sure that the money that we spend is being done efficiently and benefiting the environment as well as the landowner here, which was awesome because it’s very rare you get a private landowner willing to do this. The opposite is usually the case.”

“It was very generous of Mr. Krauss to allow the construction to happen on his property,” Breeding said.

Another partner is Envision the Choptank Collaborative. Project engineer Amanda Pollack of the nonprofit Center for Watershed Protection, is coordinating the grant-funded services of the Collaborative.

“They've been advising on our design and making sure that what we're putting in is effective, maintainable and beautiful,” Grunden said.

“The county actually doesn't have to pay us anything,” Pollack said. “We have a grant through the state of Maryland for this work.” That grant is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act 319 grant through Maryland’s Nonpoint Source Program.

The contractor is Pay Dirt LLC, based in Edgewater, Maryland. Grunden praised project manager Tyler Shamer, saying his crews have done “an amazing job creating this, because it’s beautiful and will just get better and better.”

Autumn planting of native trees, grasses and wetland plants is planned. The county will maintain the bioswales, but the constructed wetland should “take care of itself,” Grunden said. “We'll be checking it seasonally to make sure plants are thriving and everything looks good and make sure banks are stable, but it's essentially part of the county storm water network for the road.”

Krauss sends his 5-year-old grandson video updates on construction. His other grandchild is just a month old, but the project is important for his family’s future.

“This is a legacy,” he said. “I want my kids to live here or have it as long as they can. I'm hoping to get another 20 years with them, so it's a special place for them to unwind.”