Small tax, big yields

DENTON – While the value of tax ditches in Caroline County is indisputable, they are deemed Maryland waterways, or blue line streams feeding into the Chesapeake Bay, something most Eastern Shore farmers take seriously. And helping comply with state laws governing those drainage ditches is the Caroline County Soil Conservation District.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this 3-part series, we explained the history and purpose of the county’s 368-mile network of agricultural drainage ditches, as well as the role of public drainage associations (PDA) in managing the systems.

In Part 3, we look at the role the Caroline County Soil Conservation District plays in helping farmers, residents and developers include the ditches in their planning.

The maps delineating the public drainage ditches and the properties they traverse or border are consulted on a daily basis by soil conservation planners in Denton. Drainage ditch laws govern how property owners and farmers maintain and build around them.

At the District office, vintage photos of drainage ditches hang on the walls. Flattened out in large metal filing cabinets, PDA maps are detailed with red lines indicating the channels of the PDAs and dotted blue lines outlining benefited areas, all surrounded by a yellow border – the watershed area from which the channels draw. Those who land within the dotted blue lines are taxed for ditch maintenance; hence, the nickname “tax ditches.”

Trista North of the Maryland Department of Agriculture is the Public Drainage Association Coordinator for Caroline, Queen Anne's and Kent counties. Her counterpart on the lower Eastern Shore coordinates with PDAs in Worcester, Somerset and Wicomico counties.

North said the buffer along both sides of the PDAs are easement a minimum of 20 feet wide. That extra land is needed “for maintenance, for inspections, for just to be able to go down there to mow it, to put pipes in, to (navigate) excavators, mowers, and whatever equipment we might need,” she said.

“If there's a beaver dam in the ditch because it's blocking up the thorough-way somebody's got to go down there with a backhoe or an excavator, depending on how big it is,” North said.

When property tax bills go out, North said she usually fields calls or visits from those who don’t understand the PDA line item and “have no idea what a tax ditch is, because it is so unique to here.”

The usually nominal tax is set by the PDA to help offset ditch maintenance costs, which usually includes annual mowing, depending on the type of ditch. Woody growth removal occurs at longer intervals.

One of the biggest hindrances to maintaining ditches is fencing installed “right up to the ditch bank,” she said. Because a fencing permit is not required in Caroline County, Soil Conservation isn’t notified and “we can't get down there to mow it. We can't get down there to do anything else.”

Part of North’s job is to go over county-required building site plans to see how they may affect drainage ditches and their easements.

She pointed to a site plan with a PDA running “right through the middle of the property.” Because a driveway will have to traverse it to reach the house, a culvert will have to be installed at the ditch. In some cases, room to deposit eventual dredged sediment has to be considered.

Sometimes ditches require more extensive maintenance. Terra cotta pipes were once used in trenches to help move water from fields to ditches for hundreds – and in some cases – thousands of feet, and when breakage occurs over time, they’ve been replaced with plastic piping. They run two to four feet underground.

“Probably the biggest business that we do here at Soil Conservation is we have technicians that actually go out and survey and design because farmers do want to be able to crop and have a yield, and they don't want any low spots,” North said.

It’s crucial for farmers to be able to harvest beans and corn, especially following a rain event like the recent nor’easter. If there’s a wet section in the field, “heavy equipment is not going to be able to go through there without rutting it up and making a big old mess that they’ve got to come back and try to blend out because it’ll just beat and slam their equipment up,” she said. “So therefore, we go out and try to find outlets.”

The technicians successfully designed “a huge project down in Preston” with a tile network that allowed the farmer, “after the wet season this past winter, (to be) able to drive across that whole thing after a rain event, and he was able to get his whole crop off at one time and plant.”

So while the ditches themselves allow farmers to use more acreage for crop planting, in some cases the auxiliary underground piping helps rainwater find its way from low spots in a field to a drainage ditch, or to connect two or more ditches. The soil conservation district used to have its own equipment to do the work, but now local contractors help in a “kind of cooperative partnership,” North said.

With the advent of stricter environmental standards, particularly in the mid-1990s through the present time, to protect the Bay, best management practices have been recommended and adopted. In November 2018, the Maryland Department of Agriculture published its 54-page updated laws and regulations governing Public Drainage Associations.