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Dear SCA Members and Friends, Season’s Greetings! Thanks for your support in 2024—as we celebrated our 50th anniversary. Our advocacy efforts to protect and preserve farmland in the Ag Reserve and promote sustainable environmental practices have broadened and deepened in recent years. This letter solicits your annual membership dues for 2025 and also brings a special request as we face some unique challenges. As many of you know, we have waged a years-long campaign to close the aging Dickerson trash incinerator—Montgomery County’s largest single source of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Related, SCA has legal purview over operations at the County’s 100-acre yard trim compost facility near the incinerator. The County has approached us to expand the compost facility to include food waste, which makes up about one quarter of the trash the incinerator burns. We favor this idea, if well designed. Better to compost food waste than burn or landfill it. In exchange for that expansion, we have asked the County to close the incinerator as soon as is feasible—as part of its planned waste management overhaul over the next decade. Instead, the County announced in November that the incinerator could operate until 2032. Our negotiations with the County on these issues will reach decision points in 2025. There are several possible outcomes. Unfortunately, litigation is one of them. We may also need to hire subject-area experts to examine technical aspects of the County’s waste and compost plans. We are therefore asking for donations to shore up our legal and research funds. In addition: SCA is involved in legal proceedings at the state level on proposals to build large-scale ground-based solar facilities on farmland in the Ag Reserve. In partnership with Montgomery Countryside Alliance, we are engaged in the County’s assessment of a private-sector proposal to build a data center campus and battery storage facility at the site of the old coal-fired power plant in Dickerson.
You can read about all these issues on our website here. Again, we are ever grateful for your continuing support. Your dues and any additional contribution are both tax deductible. Enjoy the holiday season and our best wishes for 2025!
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