Do You Treasure the Chesapeake?
Then come January, you’ll be buying a new license plate

Sitting on Route 50 with nothing to read but a long line of monochromatic Maryland license plates can be like waiting in a dentist’s office with no Bay Weekly: Boring and a little scary.

Your 2004 traffic jams will be better.

Come January, Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administration will sell redesigned Treasure the Chesapeake license plates.

As well as giving motorists more to catch their eyes, the plates will fund Bay-improving projects throughout the Bay.

The new Treasure the Chesapeake plate is brighter, better populated and easier to see at a distance than the plate Bay-lovers have been buying since 1990. The blue from the old plate is moved to the top and stepped up in intensity, and green and gold have been added. The blue heron that was the centerpiece of the old tag is moved to the left, and a crab is added on the right to better represent the Bay.

“Maryland is for crabs, and people wondered where the crab was,” explains Chesapeake Bay Trust director David O’Neill of the process that yielded the new plate.

The change in style doesn’t mean a change in substance.

The tags have brought the Trust more than $11 million to pass along in grants for work dedicated to the Bay.

This year, the Trust invested more than $1.84 million raised by the sale of the old plates plus a dollar from check-offs on state tax returns and from 559 grants. Grants range from tiny to considerable: The range is $50 to $75,000 and the average about $4,300.

“This has been a terrific year,” says O’Neill. “We placed more money than ever back into the hands of Maryland schools, community groups and public agencies.”

From this year’s 559 grants, some 250 school and 225 community organizations benefited, some with more than one grant. Forty-six schools and organizations in Chesapeake Country received grants ranging from $50 to $50,000 in 2003 for projects running from skipjack trips, where kids taste the salt of the Bay while experiencing how oystering really worked, to planting schoolyard Bay-saving habitats doubling as living classrooms.

Of course, it’s not only kids who Treasure the Chesapeake is supporting in its work for the Bay. Kids and adults work together in the West River Oyster Project, one of the organizations that benefited.

With $12,550 from the Trust, the West River Improvement Association and the Shady Side Peninsula Association built two oyster reefs in the West River watershed to promote oyster gardening as one step in restoring native oysters.

All this for the relatively minor cost of a license plate.

The new plate will go on sale in January for $20 (plus $81 registration) at full-service MVA stations; yearly renewal costs $5. You may find the new plate so appealing that you’ll trade in your old plates before they’re due for renewal. Vanity monograms up to seven characters for an additional $50 can be ordered from forms downloaded from the MVA website: marylandmva.com.

Choices as simple as paying a few extra dollars for a license plate can help restore the Bay — not to mention making rush hour on Route 50 a little more colorful.

Now, about that dentist’s office.

— Louis Llovio

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Way Downstream…

In Texas, the Republican speaker of the House is under fire for decorating the House floor with a plastic, made-in-China Christmas tree. “I think that people can deduce for themselves about what it means to have a plastic Christmas tree from China in the Texas Statehouse,” said an irked Lanny Dreesen, of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association…

In Virginia, Marine Patrol “fish cops” have busted people selling oysters harvested from polluted waters, raided sanctuaries for female crabs and even hid illegal fish under seat cushions, yet they’re not getting the budget they need to do the job. Read an excellent story by the Virginian-Pilot at http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=63264&ran=3942.

In New Jersey, animal rights groups are fighting to curtail a black bear hunt this week, the state’s first in 33 years. More than 5,000 hunters were given permits to thin out a population estimated at more than 3,000. Increased bear sightings and a fatal bear attack in next-door New York last year prompted the hunt…

Our Creature Feature comes from New Zealand, where folks have figured out what to do with those pesky possums destroying native forests. They’re weaving lambs’ wool with the coat of the Australian brushtail possum to create clothing with the look and feel of cashmere. The government is hoping that the new business will make it worthwhile for hunters to trap the possum to reduce and thereby save the environment.

Janine Jones, a former Pennsylvanian, and her husband, Graeme, founded Kiwi Enterprises to make sweaters, gloves, socks and other articles of clothing from creatures known widely as pests.

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