Connector's fans take fight to state

Hold meeting to discuss legal action

Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009

During a July 31 special session, the five board members, staff and three state legislators withdrew into executive session to discuss the county's recourse to the resistance against the cross-county connector.

The reason the commissioners gave for closing the meeting to the public was to discuss legal advice, but meeting participants were mum afterward about what they discussed or decided.

"The plans to move forward … are at a standstill, and I do mean standstill," said Charles County commissioners' President F. Wayne Cooper (D). "The county has spent more than $650,000 to analyze the impact of the cross-county connector. We're in a state of paralysis by analysis. We have been jerked around by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Maryland Department of the Environment."

"People talk about the impact [of the connector] without thinking of the other things that go on with the planning of the county," said Sen. Thomas "Mac" Middleton (D-Charles). "For a high-density planned development you've got to have safe connections and good infrastructure, and this project is an integral part. I think we need to engage with [the Department of the Environment] and the [Army Corps] and have some straight talk with them."

Dels. Murray D. Levy and Sally Y. Jameson, both Charles Democrats, also attended the meeting.

The fighting words uttered during last week's meeting come only days after several blows to the county's plan to connect the western portion of the region with its urban center via a new highway between Middletown Road and Route 210.

On July 21, the county's planning and growth department received word from the state that its authority to require a Tier II anti-degradation analysis was applicable to the connector project, after the county requested MDE take another look at the scope of its jurisdiction. Tier II streams have the second highest-quality water in Maryland.

Written by Maryland Department of the Environment Nontidal Wetlands and Waterways Division Chief Amanda Sigillito, the response from the state also ordered Charles County to install mandatory 100-foot buffers in area that have slopes that are too steep and soils that are prone to erosion, conduct biological and chemical monitoring in the Tier II watershed, and to await further review and instructions for the county's report in the near future.

"I have never witnessed in four decades where the rules can be changed arbitrarily and capriciously," said Commissioner Gary V. Hodge (D). "The county has been asked to look at four additional [endangered] species. It's simply unprecedented, and I'm exasperated with what seems to be a completely illegitimate quest for information."

"There's a growing perception that the Maryland Department of the Environment is allowing extremists to lead it by the nose. I know what these agencies have the responsibility to do, and I know what local government is expected to do. … I'm not convinced that we can satisfy the requirements laid on us."

Experts from the state however, said the requirements are nothing short of necessary to promote and maintain a high level of water quality.

"People want to live in areas with good, clean water," said Richard Eskin, director of the science services administration for MDE. "It's our mission, our goal, to protect high quality water."

The connector project, Eskin said, is a large one, and a plan county leaders should not be surprised requires restrictions, creates complications and uses up not a small amount of time.

The Tier II level means the state and county need "to do whatever we can to minimize the impact" of the road on the environment, if the county can justify that adverse effect on the watershed, Eskin said.

"We know buffers are very effective at keeping activity away from the streams," Eskin said. "The grass and trees in the buffer intercept pollution."

As for the monitoring, Eskin said that involves looking at the larvae, adult insects and fish that call the Mattawoman their home, and studying the rate of degradation or improvement of their watery environment.

"We want to make sure to keep things balanced," Eskin said. "[The state] established that baseline where the whole idea is to not let water quality degrade, but it can allow some degradation."

The most recent attempt by local conservationists to fight the connector was the publishing of a late June survey that took the opinion of 500 registered Charles County voters on the topic of managed growth, environmental conservation and how those concepts factored into the cross-county connector project.

Though a majority of those questioned supported a connection between the western and central areas of the county, most did not want to jeopardize the environment, nor pay from county taxpayer funds.

"The issue stopped being an environmental one," Levy said .

"Now it's a no-growth and not-in-my-backyard issue. They're not the same."

More than half of the connector has been completed, but the remaining three phases involve crossing Mattawoman Creek and impacting roughly seven acres of sensitive wetland.

Besides linking one half of the county to another, advocates for the connector point to its benefit of providing a much safer alternative to driving Billingsley Road.

"Seventy percent of Billingsley Road will be replaced by the connector, so we will see an immediate drop in the huge volume of accidents," Hodge said. "Those segments that will not be replaced will still carry local traffic, but … it will become a local road instead of a road that crosses the county."

Levy addressed the argument of simply straightening Billingsley Road and forgoing the remainder of the connector by explaining that that option was studied in the early planning stages of the connector.

"People [on] Billingsley Road threw a fit. They [didn't] want the road [there]," Levy said.

Another problem with the opposition's stance is the belief that the cross-county connector is directly linked to growth, the delegate said.

"Growth has already come and it will continue to come, because Charles County is a wonderful place to live," Levy said.

About two-thirds of the development district the connector will run through has already been planned or built. The county's belief is that without a planned connector road through the area there will be a hodgepodge of small roadways that will do more damage to the environment than the county-engineered highway.

"[The county] would have some say on the access roads, but they would not be in an organized fashion," said Louis Grasso, a member of the county's planning commission. "There would be traffic and safety difficulties, and that's not the way you plan communities. The developers are entitled to do the best they can, but they have no ability to see the future."

The highway is scheduled to cost about $44 million.

msomers@somdnews.com