The Center for Public Integrity

The New Jersey-based homebuilder K. Hovnanian Enterprises is under investigation by the Department of Justice for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

Hovnanian, which has been fighting for almost a decade to construct the Four Seasons development on Kent Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is being investigated for storm water discharge practices at several of its mid-Atlantic development sites, according to a Securities and Exchange report the company filed in June.

The inquiry into Hovnanian, one of the nation’s 10 largest builders, is for storm water runoff from construction activities, which can have a significant impact on water quality. As rain water flows over a construction site, it can pick up pollutants including chemicals, debris, and sediment. Without controls and barriers, the runoff often washes into the nearest waterway where it can harm or kill fish and other wildlife, in addition to causing erosion.

According to the report, the Department of Justice began looking into the company’s storm water discharge practices after a series of inquiries by the Environmental Protection Agency in connection with homebuilding in the agency’s Region 3, which includes Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Hovnanian has developments in each of those states, but its filing mentioned only two EPA notices of violations, both related to projects in Pennsylvania.

“We have no further comment beside what is in the SEC filing,” said Doug Fenichel, a K. Hovnanian spokesman.

While officials from both the EPA and the Justice Department said they do not release information or comment on ongoing investigations, Mark Pollins, director of the EPA’s Water Enforcement Division, said the Justice Department generally becomes involved in the more egregious and complex cases, which are likely to result in larger penalties.

Halfway between the battlefield at Gettysburg and Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, U.S. Route 15 passes through Loudoun County, an area that may be less known, but is no less steeped in American history.

Over the decades, Loudoun has been a colonial farming community, a Civil War battleground, a second home for presidents and statesmen, and a rural escape for long-haul commuters to Washington, D.C., and its inner suburbs. And like many other historical areas across the country, in Loudoun County preservationists and developers are struggling to determine the future of the land and the character of the county.

In May, preservationists won an important battle, when 175 miles of Route 15 in Virginia became part of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area — a federal designation aimed at preserving the historic region and promoting tourism. Although the designation does not affect development regulations, it will help to foster pride in the history of the area, said Cate Magennis Wyatt, the founder and president of the nonprofit Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership. “Certainly there will be a greater pride in place when Congress and the president say this region is critically important to the telling of the American story,” she said.

The story of the land along Route 15 begins with Native Americans, who traversed what came to be called the Carolina Trail centuries before Europeans arrived and forced them out. Quakers were among Loudoun’s first settlers, establishing settlements in the 1720s in Waterford, Lincoln, Hamilton, and Unison. Germans from Maryland and Pennsylvania, Scots-Irish, Dutch, and English followed.

Civil War remains a reality in Loudoun County, Virginia.

Abundant historical and cultural touchstones of that era dot the landscape. Scores of villages that bore witness to battles remain, some nearly unchanged. Activists work to preserve the churches that served as hospitals and graveyards for soldiers during the war. Families tell stories of forbears who fought here, while descendants of carpetbaggers still possess antebellum estates. About 30 miles from Washington, D.C., Loudoun County was just far enough from the Union lines to feel a part of Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy, yet close enough that sections of the county changed hands repeatedly during the war.

While present-day residents have abandoned the sentiment that the Civil War ended just yesterday, a different battle brews here. The spoils continue to be the land, but the opposing sides have shifted to east and west, rather than north and south.

A physical line, running up and down the county, divides its 517-square-mile surface area: Route 15 runs southward out of the county to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and northward into Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. To the east of that line is an area of stunning growth, accounting for most of Loudoun’s three-fold population explosion since 1990 (from 86,129 to 278,797 in 2007). It is a land where single-family homes stand shoulder-to-shoulder, many on quarter-acre lots along a maze-work of roads, where muscular “McMansions” compete for bragging rights and strip malls spring up like weeds along an abandoned railroad track. Yet, to the west, between Route 15 and the Blue Ridge Mountains, is what remains of the pastoral past.

If land planners in Buckingham Township in central Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had their way, the Village of Buckingham Springs, a 151-acre age-restricted modular home community, would not exist. The land where it sits would still be a farm.

The development is one of seven that resulted from a 1970s lawsuit that ushered in a period of rapid expansion in the township, which grew from 5,150 in 1970 to more than 19,000 today, many of them former residents of the close-in suburbs of Philadelphia.

Although Buckingham Springs stands as a symbol of developers’ victory over local zoning, the “active adult community” for people over 55 is one win followed by a string of costly losses that occurred when its developer attempted to expand the community onto adjoining farmland.

Land planners, township government officials, and the developer’s attorneys say the villain in the battle over Buckingham Springs is the same — the curative amendment, a zoning challenge process unique to Pennsylvania, which both sides say benefits the other. Yet despite its problems, land use battles brought under the curative amendment process have defined development in Bucks County and other areas where rural meets urban.

In Pennsylvania, municipalities are responsible for land-use planning, but guidelines are laid out in the state’s Municipalities Planning Code. Case law interpreting the statute has required local governments to provide for all types of uses and to accept its “fair share” of development.

When the bullet smashed through the living room window of Rick Patt’s Bucks County farmhouse, he was asleep. He didn’t hear the gunshot. He didn’t hear the glass break.

It wasn’t until early the next morning, soon after he woke up, that Patt noticed the small hole in the window surrounded by a web of cracks. He stared at it until the idea formed: “It looked like, you know, like a bullet hole.”

Patt called police, who later found a hole in the wooden mantle across his living room. The bullet was small caliber. Probably some kids out causing trouble or an errant shot from a hunter, an officer told Patt. Patt doubted it.

That was 2005. Three years earlier, Patt had moved from New York City into the 1790s-era stone house in rural Pennsylvania. The 52-year-old former hospital radiologist never had trouble with the locals. Truth is, he hadn’t met many of them.

For most of the time he lived in Tinicum, Patt kept to himself. He ran his pharmaceutical consulting business from the barn behind his house and entertained friends from the city for country weekends.

Not long before someone shot through his window, Patt learned that developers planned to cover a farm field less than a mile from his home with 192 apartments, a pool, and a community center. That proposal turned out to be only a small part of the plans developers have for Tinicum.

In all, developers filed plans for 460 garden apartments, 42 townhomes, 10 multiplex apartments, 137 single-family homes, and a waste water treatment plant that would discharge into nearby Tohickon Creek, a shale-bottomed waterway popular with hikers, fishers, and kayakers.

Patt decided to organize his neighbors and fight back.

As he stood staring at the bullet hole in his window, Patt worried that the shot was fired as a warning. Now three years later, as the land-use battle makes its way toward the courts, Patt is sure of it. Someone is trying to rattle his nerves.

James W. Rouse was an Eastern Shore boy, born and raised in Easton (pop. 14,000), the county seat of rural Talbot County.

Rouse’s hometown sits on the Chesapeake Bay side of Maryland’s Eastern Shore — the chunk of Maryland that, combined with Delaware and a bit of Virginia, droops down from the mainland between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

A lawyer by training, in 1939 Rouse joined a mortgage banking firm which morphed into The Rouse Company, the development company that made him famous for projects that transformed decaying downtowns into “festival marketplaces,” including Baltimore’s Harbor Place, Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

In 1954, Rouse chose his hometown as the site for his first project, a shopping center called Talbottown. He intended this L-shaped brick plaza as a model of “urban infill” —today’s planning jargon for new development that naturally fits into an existing downtown area, easily accessible to pedestrians. (Today, Talbottown — home of a dozen shops, a handful of offices, and the upscale Rustic Inn restaurant — is the only shopping center of its kind in the area.)

From Talbottown, Rouse went on to achieve national prominence. In 1967, he unveiled the city of Columbia in Howard County — a so-called “new town” that had been built from scratch in an attempt to capture the small-town feel of a community like Easton, and today has a population of more than 98,000.

In 1973, Rouse announced plans to develop Wye Island, 2,800 acres of isolated farmland in Queen Anne’s County, about a 30-minute drive from where the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hits the Eastern Shore. Rouse’s idea was considered revolutionary by some. By others, repellent.

ADELAIDE, Australia — Fifteen months after Adelaide signed a contract turning over its waterworks to a private consortium controlled by Thames Water and Vivendi, the city was engulfed in a powerful sewage smell, which became known as "the big pong."

The smell plagued Adelaide for much of a three-month period in 1997. While water company and government officials attributed the intense rotten egg stench to weather patterns that prevented normal urban sewage odors from dissipating, citizens complained of mood swings, nausea, sinus problems, asthma, headaches and sleeping disorders.

Early in June, the third month of the pong, an independent investigator tracked it to the largest of Adelaide's four wastewater treatment plants, at Bolivar, 11 miles north of the city. Once identified, the problem was resolved by chemical dosing of the plant's extensive lagoon system, which soon eliminated the smell.

The investigation, funded by the government and led by University of Queensland water treatment expert Ken Hartley, found that weather conditions at the time of the pong were no different from previous years. The pong — a stench, in colloquial English — resulted from equipment failures and inadequate monitoring, which allowed raw sewage to be flushed directly into settling lagoons, according to the investigative report.

The consortium's drive to minimize costs was what brought on the failures, Hartley believes — a familiar story in the water privatization game.