How local governments are "sandboxing" their way to more effective Bay restoration

In many communities of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, trees do much more than shade the street and beautify your yard, they also factor into local stormwater management plans. Trees can slow stormwater runoff from paved or impervious surfaces, improving local water quality. 

Over the past several years, Montgomery County, Maryland, has planted upwards of 15,000 trees to protect local waterways and meet stormwater requirements. However, in order to receive credit towards their stormwater permit, all these trees must be evaluated in person every three years to ensure they are still healthy. With the county planting thousands of trees per year, inspection costs have soared, creating a significant bottleneck for local government officials. Montgomery Country officials are looking into alternative methods of inspecting these trees through an innovative framework known as regulatory sandboxing. 

What is regulatory sandboxing?

The Environmental Policy Innovation Center defines regulatory sandboxing as a space “carve[d] out from existing government rules around permitting, licensing or approvals—i.e. it intentionally breaks a regulatory barrier—in order to encourage testing of new products that benefit consumers.” Simply put, it creates a flexible testing ground to trial new innovations for faster conservation and restoration benefits. 

Regulatory sandboxes are unique in that they are created and controlled by regulators. They are also distinct from pilot programs or standard legal exemptions because they operate under specific constraints: they limit the time for testing, limit the scale of testing, require clearly defined outcomes, rapidly approve or reject proposals to participate, limit and disclose risks to consumers, and allow small organizations to test ideas in a system that favors well-staffed and resourced groups. 

Overall, regulatory sandboxes focus on experimentation for the purpose of fine-tuning new approaches before they are made available for everyone to use. 

Sandbox Process

How can regulatory sandboxes benefit watershed restoration?

In 2024, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) released an influential report that highlighted regulatory sandboxing as one opportunity to drive innovation within Chesapeake Bay watershed restoration efforts. According to the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report, a regulatory sandbox could be used to test out new pollutant reduction practices or processes for verifying or crediting those practices. 

Montgomery County certainly sees the opportunity in testing out new solutions in their work. With a regulatory sandbox, the county could apply to waive the in person inspection regulation for stormwater management practices for a set number of years and experiment with statistical modelling to evaluate the health of the newly planted trees instead. With a statistical model, county staff could conduct physical inspections on a subset of trees and then extrapolate that data to predict the conditions of all trees planted that year. 

If Montgomery County’s model proved successful in accurately predicting the conditions of all trees planted in a year, within a reasonable margin of error, regulators could allow this inspection technique to graduate from the regulatory sandbox and become a standard practice for other local governments to use towards crediting their stormwater practices. The new approach would ultimately reduce the demands on local government staff time and resources, while ensuring the newly planted trees are having their intended effects on stormwater management. 

Regulatory sandboxing also has value when it comes to fisheries management. Despite being a popular trophy catch among anglers, blue catfish have been widely recognized as an invasive fish species throughout the Bay watershed. Public campaigns actively encourage harvesting of these catfish in Maryland and Virginia, but traditional fishing practices have often fallen short. Virginia has recently seen success with permitting commercial electrofishing for blue catfish to diminish populations, but permits are tightly regulated. The state has issued only three permits to date, one each for portions of the James, Rappahannock and Pamunkey rivers. These three fishing permits alone accounted for 11% of Virginia’s overall blue catfish harvest in 2023, clearly demonstrating the efficacy of this method. 

This is where Virginia could use regulatory sandboxing to safely explore further opportunities with electrofishing for invasive species. If the state were to expand the number of electrofishing permits available, for a designated number of years with appropriate guardrails, anglers may be able to demonstrate a successful reduction in blue catfish without harming Virginia’s trophy fishing industry. 

Opportunities and challenges for local governments with regulatory sandboxes

With opportunities for innovation abounding at state and local levels, interest in regulatory sandboxing is starting to spread to even more local governments throughout the Bay watershed. However, local leaders have a few recommendations for how to make it more effective. 

In September 2024, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Local Government Advisory Committee (LGAC) met in Shepherdstown, West Virginia to discuss regulatory sandboxing and potential opportunities for adoption in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. LGAC members' interest was piqued by the CESR report and they were eager to better understand the concept and discuss specific, local government related opportunities for its application. 

After hearing from Phoebe Higgins with the Environmental Policy Innovation Center about the background and definition of regulatory sandboxing, and reviewing potential examples, LGAC members settled on a few key takeaways. First, LGAC suggests developing a clear process to identify and set-up regulatory sandboxes. Second, they believe that regulatory sandboxes could be a valuable tool to lower costs for local governments while scaling up benefits to communities. And lastly, to fully determine its potential, LGAC recommends that regulatory sandboxing should be strategically tested across a number of different contexts, not just discussed. 

In LGAC’s 2024 annual recommendations to the Chesapeake Executive Council, members highlighted regulatory sandboxing as a possible opportunity to grant local governments flexibility to meet regulations in cost-effective and innovative ways. Still, members cautioned that implementation of regulatory sandboxes needs to be carefully managed to avoid undermining existing regulations or negatively impacting natural resources.