The Capital
There will be posturing, no doubt, when Gov. Martin O’Malley’s push to ban the use of most new septic systems gets a hearing before a House of Delegates committee next week. But the effort is effectively dead for this year.
That’s just as well. Even if this O’Malley initiative makes some sense in the abstract, it was far too extreme to get through the legislature. And the governor didn’t bother to prepare the ground for it or build consensus. He just dropped it on the General Assembly during his State of the State address, startling not just legislators but environmentalists.
