King helped bring safe water, sewer

Metcom director retires

Friday, Feb. 27, 2009

Steve King doesn't have grandkids yet, but he wants to ensure the region has enough clean water to drink for at least the next 100 years.

Friday marks his last day at the offices of the St. Mary's Metropolitan Commission, the county's public water and sewer utility. He has worked with MetCom since 1976 and been its director since 1998.

Though he had his office cleaned out by Tuesday evening, he said this week, "I'll still have responsibility as director until 12:01 a.m. March 1." That's when his successor, attorney Jacquelyn Meiser, takes over the job.

The first sewage treatment plant in St. Mary's County was opened in 1939 to serve Leonardtown. The Navy then brought facilities in at the torpedo testing range in Piney Point in 1940 and at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in 1942.

MetCom was created by Maryland law in 1957, by then-state delegate J. Frank Raley, and it wasn't until 1964 that MetCom board members began meeting regularly. Raley called it "one of the most controversial issues that I was ever involved in," and he was also among those responsible for phasing slot machines out of Southern Maryland and sharing the Potomac River with Virginia. Some business interests were vehemently opposed to MetCom because they wanted to build anywhere in the county, without being connected to central lines, he said.

When King, 55, came to MetCom in 1976, raw sewage was a widespread problem. Several neighborhoods had failing septic systems.

"Many places had raw sewage in the drainage ditches, the streets," King said. There were problems in St. Clement Shores, Barefoot Acres, Greenview Knolls, in Piney Point and in Great Mills.

"We made a lot of progress," he said. Failing septic systems were replaced with central sewer lines.

MetCom operates five sewage treatment plants, but only the largest, the Marlay-Taylor plant in Lexington Park discharges into the Chesapeake Bay. Its effluent's nitrogen levels are consistently below allowed standards of 8 milligrams per liter.

However, in the future, treated water needs to be absorbed into the ground to keep harmful elements out of the bay. "We cannot continue to discharge everything into the tidewater," he said.

Nitrogen and phosphorus feed unnatural algae blooms in the water, which create dead zones when the oxygen is consumed by bacteria feeding on their remains.

King has consistently said sewage treatment plants have reduced their nitrogen loads into the Chesapeake Bay watershed by 60 percent since 1985, while other sources such as developments and farms with their runoff continue to increase.

Recycling treated wastewater should become a regular practice, he said, through spray irrigation of crops and sending the water back to homes and businesses to be used to flush toilets, water gardens and wash vehicles.

That water is "highly, extremely well-treated, disinfected," King said. "Why not keep as much [treated] water out of the bay as possible?"

Unlike other areas of the state that use reservoirs or rivers for drinking water supplies, the Southern Maryland region's water supply comes from confined underground aquifers. The supply is good for at least the next 25 years, but he said he wants to see the supply go into the hundreds of years through the use of new technologies for reclaimed water.

"The first step is the most difficult step," he said. "I hope to move that process further than we have" during his career.

"I think that's something my successor and the county need to move ahead on," he said.

"Thirty-three years was just yesterday," he said of the time gone by.

King said he would like his work to be remembered as innovative, as "trying to think outside of the box."

He said, "I don't need anything named after me."

"I thought he did a pretty damn good job," Raley said. "He carried that thing on as well as I thought it could be done."

Lilian Bryan has been King's administrative assistant for almost 25 years. She said in all of that time she has never met anyone "more focused or committed to an agency than Steve King has and that's the absolute truth."

As King's workspace transitioned to Meiser, Bryan said, "It's beginning to kind of strike and it's going to be quite sad. I just totally respect him."

But in her 47 years of working all together, she added, "I've never had a woman boss."

After King departs from MetCom he will still continue work with the International Rural Water Association and the Maryland Association of Municipal Wastewater Agencies. He and the Leonardtown Rotary have helped nine small villages in Honduras collect clean water in storage tanks for drinking. Otherwise, women haul water out from local streams, contaminated with harmful bacteria. King is going back to Honduras next month to help finish three systems.

jbabcock@somdnews.com