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Community2007 top stories of the year
Triumphs and tragedies filled a busy year for Charles County
Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photos by Gary Smith
Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown delivers an address in August marking the opening of the Route 5 bypass in Hughesville.
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Charles County had some good moments in 2007, but also some moments of terrible tragedy.
The overriding impression of the year, looking at the top 10 stories of 2007, listed here in no particular order, is of excess.
There was too much politics for a nonelection year; too many young lives lost in senseless traffic accidents; too many students in public schools; too many cars on county roads.
Many will disagree with the choice of the stories listed here, but these are the issues and events that we feel captured the most attention, affected the most lives and had the most impact on the future of everyone in Charles County.
The coming year — an election year, the county’s 350th anniversary year — promises to be a busy one. But let’s take one last look back at 2007.
Play ball!
After decades of wishful thinking, public outcry and negotiation, Charles County is finally getting a baseball stadium.
Despite stiff opposition from some citizens and a sharply increased price tag, the Charles County commissioners pushed on and closed the deal this year for the new 4,500-seat, $26 million Regency Furniture Stadium that is planned to open in time for this year’s baseball season.
The bids the county received for the stadium in 2006 ranged from $23 million to $26 million, above the county’s $21 million budget for the project. So in February, the commissions agreed to spend $180,000 to redesign the stadium plans, shave costs and hopefully get a better bid price for the project.
However, when the new bids arrived for a supposedly cheaper design this summer, the low bid from Skanska Construction came in at $25.6 million.
In July, the commissioners narrowly voted to adopt a controversial funding scheme that increased the amount of risk the county shouldered for the project in order to save an extra $1 million for county taxpayers.
Commissioners Reuben B. Collins II (D), Samuel N. Graves Jr. (D) and Gary V. Hodge (D) voted to issue public bonds with low interest rates for Maryland Baseball’s one-third share of the project as well as its own third.
Maryland Baseball will not reap any savings from the cheaper public bonds. Instead, according to county documents describing the deal, Maryland Baseball will make payments to the county over the next 15 years for the public bonds that equal the amount the company would have paid for private bonds.
The county plans to funnel the savings from using the cheaper public bonds into the project’s contingency fund. If the fund is not used up at the end of the project’s construction, officials said it could be applied to the county’s share of the construction cost and save the taxpayers some money.
Or, as commissioners’ President F. Wayne Cooper (D) revealed in October, the extra funds could simply be used to pave the parking lot.
Skanska began preparing the stadium site even as the commissioners were closing the new deal. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) came to the county in late July to participate in the official groundbreaking.
The stadium’s home team, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, opened offices in Waldorf in October and announced the hiring of team manager Butch Hobson in November. The team plans to play its first home game in May.
Jay Friess
Young lives lost forever
Autumn of 2007 holds the sad distinction in Charles County of being the season when six teenagers lost their lives on area roads.
In the 31 days between Oct. 27 and Nov. 28, police responded to three separate traffic accidents that left the community stunned at the loss of the promise each of the victims held.
Noel Patrick Reynolds, 16, of White Plains was killed Oct. 27 in a single-car accident on Billingsley Road in Waldorf.
Four La Plata High School students died in a Nov. 8 crash on Olivers Shop Road. Jonathan Chapman, 16, of La Plata, Tavonne Alston, 16, of La Plata, Dionnte Swinson, 15, of La Plata and Donte Segar, 15, of Hughesville were killed in the collision on their way home from an informal preseason basketball practice.
Stephanie Weir, 15, a star of the varsity field hockey team at Thomas Stone High School, was killed Nov. 28 when the car in which she was a passenger skidded on Poplar Hill Road in Waldorf and hit a tree.
Earlier in the year on Feb. 5, 2006 La Plata graduate Aaron DeMarco Thomas, 18, of Newburg lost control of his car on Route 257. He succumbed to internal injuries.
According to police, Calvert High School student Britiany Marie Mercer, 17, of California was not wearing a seat belt when she was killed in a collision near Forest Park in May.
While — as of mid-day Dec. 31 — the county had 23 traffic fatalities during the year, it was the number of teens killed in collisions that spurred county and state leaders to discuss options to prevent more accidents.
In the end, Charles County Schools Superintendent James E. Richmond suggested asking students about their thoughts on the subject.
‘‘Kids will come up with good ideas, they always do,” he said in November.
During a December meeting among high school student council members, Charles County Sheriff Rex W. Coffey (D) and Sen. Thomas ‘‘Mac” Middleton (D-Charles), the students were overwhelmingly in favor of encouraging legislators and law enforcement agencies to enact and enforce tougher laws for young drivers.
While no rules have been put in place, suggestions from the students included the placement of a sticker on a vehicle being operated by a driver with a provisional license.
Police have also been monitoring school parking lots to ensure teens are wearing seat belts.
Sara K. Taylor
Opening linesof communication
Making good on campaign promises, the school board members have rearranged how they communicate with the public.
Beginning Jan. 1, a fresh school board — four newly elected and three incumbents — took office and since then their meetings have been televised and moved from day to night so more people can see them. The meetings’ minutes are also made available more quickly.
On the idea that working parents would be able to make evening meetings more easily, the school board voted unanimously to change their monthly meeting times from 1 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. beginning with the April meeting.
An electronic survey compiled by the county school system’s communications department found almost 87 percent of those surveyed would consider attending meetings if they were changed to later in the day.
However, since the shift to a later meeting time no more people are attending meetings.
The time change was only adopted for a nine-month trial period, and the school board will reconsider the time at its Jan. 8 meeting.
Getting meetings and other events televised was also a major obstacle the new school board was able to overcome during its first year. On Sept. 11, the school system’s television station, Comcast Channel 96, broadcast its first-ever school board meeting. Board meetings held at the Jesse L. Starkey Administration Building in La Plata are aired live and the most recent meeting is rebroadcast at 9 a.m. Wednesdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. For residents who do not have cable television or would like to watch past meetings, the communications department will make copies of the broadcast.
The current school board also sped up the process of how long it takes for meeting minutes to be released to the public — from at least 30 days to seven days.
Responsible for the delayed release was the policy that said the board had to approve the minutes before they were released. And with the board typically only meeting once a month, the school board would not have the chance to approve the minutes until weeks after the meeting.
The school board solved this by changing the policy, stating draft minutes could be released before the board officially approved them and within seven business days of the original meeting.
Jacqueline Rabe
County managementall shook up
When the newly elected board of Charles County commissioners took the helm of local government this year, they made some hard turns in choppy waters, and not everyone stayed in the boat.
The commissioners let all employees know there was a new captain on board in February, issuing a 22-point resolution that called for curtailment of most take-home use of county vehicles, the elimination of casual dress Fridays and the discontinuation of the county’s compressed work schedule.
The management shakeup began soon afterward.
Deputy County Administrator Victoria L. Greenfield resigned later that month after 10 years in county service. Both public information officer Nina Voehl and commissioners’ secretary Carolyn Schoonover followed Greenfield in April, resigning after 14 years of service each.
Another major shakeup occurred in July, when new utilities chief Jerry Michael and public facilities director Mike Mudd retired.
The next month, economic development director John Reardon posted his resignation after less than two years with the county to take a job with the Facchina Cos. construction company.
Planning director David Umling left after three years of county service in order to take a planning job in Cumberland.
Two more senior management positions opened when tourism chief Joanne Roland and emergency services director Don McGuire announced plans to retire.
The commissioners have been hiring replacements steadily. County Administrator Paul W. Comfort came on board in March, followed by press secretary George Clarkson in June. Administrative and Fiscal Services Director Deborah Hudson was hired in October.
In November, former planning and growth management director Roy Hancock was named permanent assistant to Comfort. Willis ‘‘Bill” Proper was given permanent command of the public facilities department. And Melvin C. ‘‘Chuck” Beall, Jr. filled Hancock’s old shoes.
Early in December, Donna Dudley was hired as the new tourism chief, and Amy Calvin was named as the county’s new events specialist.
The county is still searching for permanent replacements for its planning director, utilities chief, economic development director and a permits chief positions.
Jay Friess
Environmental watchdogs
The end of 2007 found the western end of the Charles County’s cross-county connector highway project in the same condition it was at the beginning of 2007 — mired in bureaucratic review and drawing heavy opposition from environmental watchdogs.
The remaining section of the project, planned to run on a new alignment between Middletown Road in Waldorf and Route 210 in Bryans Road, is currently awaiting a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cross the wetlands of the Mattawoman Creek.
County officials are growing impatient with the corps’ review, which has stretched months beyond expectations. Officials view the connector as a vital link in their transportation strategy and have repeatedly said the road is key to reducing traffic congestion and accommodating future growth. The longer the road is delayed, they worry, the more expensive the project will become as construction prices continue to creep upward with inflation.
The county commissioners have lobbied both federal legislators and the local business community to pressure the corps to issue a permit.
But officials can keep waiting as long as it takes, according to environmental watchdogs like the Mattawoman Watershed Society. The group is asking the corps to not issue a permit and to rule that the project should undergo a complete environmental review, which could take another year.
Environmentalists fear that the project would stab right through the heart of the county’s last unsullied creek, bringing an onslaught of development and poisonous stormwater runoff to the fragile ecosystem. They want the public to see what impact the connector could have before it is built.
County officials have recently countered that development is coming to the area one way or another, and they would like to service that development with a road that employs the best environmental construction practices used in the county to date. Officials argue that, if the connector were not built, inferior developer-built roads would end up serving the area.
Jay Friess
All tapped out?
The seriousness of the problem of Southern Maryland’s dwindling groundwater supply rose to the surface throughout 2007 as a devastating drought left farm fields parched and barren.
For several years, elected officials in Southern Maryland have been grappling with what to do about the decreasing supply of groundwater drawn from aquifers buried deep beneath the ground. Both Charles County’s and La Plata’s public water systems draw from aquifers and early this summer elected officials began asking residents to voluntarily conserve water as the drought wore on.
Although severe thunderstorms with drenching rains did hit the region sporadically throughout the summer, the onslaught of heavy rain did not save farmers who were facing huge monetary losses from crops that were scorched because of the lack of rain.
In August, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) asked for and received federal drought emergency status for areas of Maryland hardest hit by the dry weather, including Charles, St. Mary’s and Calvert counties. Although it offered some monetary assistance, the federal drought aid did little to soften the financial blow farmers faced because of a scanty harvest caused by little or no rain.
National Weather Service meteorologists said that the only sure-fire cure for the dry conditions plaguing not only Maryland, but much of the country, would be a drenching tropical storm system.
Although several hurricanes were predicted for the 2007 season, no tropical storms blew in from the Atlantic Ocean to the East Coast to provide relief from the dry conditions.
The drought intensified how serious the depletion of the region’s aquifers is — a situation that is forcing elected officials to seek ways to address the problem before it gets out of hand.
The problem came to a head in the summer when the Charles County commissioners learned that Mirant Mid-Atlantic LLC in Morgantown planned to withdraw up to 1.7 million gallons of water a day from the Patuxent aquifer. The groundwater is needed to operate a wet scrubber at the electric company’s coal-fired plant on the Potomac River.
The scrubbers must be installed under the mandates of the Maryland Clean Air Act.
In an effort to mitigate the amount of groundwater that must be used to operate the scrubbers, the county commissioners decided to construct a $25 million pipeline to draw treated effluent from White Plains to Morgantown for use in Mirant’s scrubber. The company would then pay the county for use of the effluent and the county would agree to provide a consistent quality of treatment for the water at the Mattawoman Wastewater Treatment Plant in Mason Springs.
Some of La Plata’s treated effluent would also be used to operate the scrubbers.
Details of the agreement between the county and Mirant are still under negotiation, according to county officials.
Charles County struck a similar agreement with the Panda Energy plant in Brandywine.
Local officials must do everything they can to slow down the use of groundwater in Southern Maryland, said Vivian Mills, president of the Conservancy for Charles County.
‘‘It’s a finite supply,” she said. ‘‘Aquifers do get replenished, but very slowly.”
Nancy Bromley McConaty
A gift for commuters
Southern Maryland commuters were given reason to rejoice in February when the Maryland State Highway Administration opened the Route 5 bypass around the town of Hughesville.
However, Hughesville businesses had less to be happy about. The initial road opening clamped off traffic at the northern and southern ends of town, where the old road would eventually interconnect with the new.
For more than five months, the only way to access downtown Hughesville from the highway was to exit at Route 231 and navigate a series of circular interchanges.
Most drivers didn’t bother. Several establishments saw their customer traffic drop by as much as 80 percent.
The northern and southern interchanges reopened in early August. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the $56 million project was held on a blistering hot morning a week later.
But business has been slow to warm back up in Hughesville. The town’s car dealership closed, and several businesses were hanging on by their fingernails when the ramps reopened.
The county began planning for this problem four years ago, appointing a citizen task force to develop a comprehensive redevelopment plan for the town. The commissioners adopted the completed plan in August.
The plan calls for the village to be redeveloped as a pedestrian-friendly collection of mixed-use properties over the next 20 to 25 years, if the county can find a way to expand its infrastructure capacity.
‘‘Obviously, water and sewer [capacity] is a major obstacle in Hughesville,” said Cathy Hardy, program manager for community planning, in February. ‘‘The next step for water and sewer is a feasibility study.”
The bypass project was supposed to be completed by the end of October; however, SHA crews until recently were still putting the finishing touches on the southbound sound barrier, painting the wall to look like brick. For now, Hughesville businesses can only take comfort in the fact that their town is no longer full of traffic.
Jay Friess
In Annapolis, special session makes up for quiet 1st half
The year in politics opened with a yawn and closed with a boom.
Democrats celebrated the inauguration in January of Martin O’Malley as Maryland’s 61st governor, which returned one-party rule to Annapolis. The harmony lasted throughout much of the legislative session, which saw the passage of a statewide restaurant smoking ban, tighter environmental regulations and a first-in-the-nation living wage requirement for state contractors.
Lawmakers also advanced the 2008 presidential primary by three weeks to Feb. 12 (other states have since leapfrogged Maryland in the front-loaded election calendar) and ratified an agreement that would use a national popular vote for president if enough states follow suit. The General Assembly also signed off on a paper trail for balloting, contingent upon funding, put the question of early voting to a referendum next November, beefed up penalties against child sex predators and created a subcabinet to address issues related to Base Realignment and Closure.
Efforts to repeal the death penalty and grant illegal immigrants in-state tuition status were among the few hot-button issues that failed.
Most of the fireworks occurred during the exhausting 22-day special session in November to resolve the state’s projected $1.5 billion structural deficit. Republicans unsuccessfully attempted to block a slew of tax increases and measures to put the question of legalized slot machines on the November 2008 ballot.
As a result, the sales tax will increase one penny to 6 cents per dollar and be expanded to include computer services, which has riled some legislators and technology executives. Personal income tax brackets were restructured and will be assessed on a sliding scale. Also, the corporate income tax was raised from 7 percent to 8.25 percent, the tax on a pack of cigarettes was doubled to $2 and the vehicle titling tax mirrored the 20 percent increase in the sales tax.
Most of the tax measures kicked in Jan. 1.
The new revenue will provide $400 million for transportation projects, $110 million for a new fleet of state police helicopters, $50 million for Chesapeake Bay restoration initiatives and health coverage for 100,000 uninsured Marylanders. Lawmakers also recommended O’Malley cut $550 million from the fiscal 2009 budget, including the elimination of 500 vacant state government jobs and how education aid is calculated.
Voters will decide this year whether to put 15,000 slot machines at sites in Allegany, Anne Arundel, Cecil and Worcester counties and in Baltimore City. If approved, slots are projected to pump $700 million annually into Maryland’s economy. The lion’s share of the proceeds will be reserved for education and the balance will go towards the state’s ailing thoroughbred horse racing industry, local governments where slots are located and to treat gambling addicts.
Alan Brody
Nonprofit funding
It started, like many controversies in Charles County government this year, with the county commissioners’ 22-point February resolution, declaring their intentions about how they would run local government.
Two points of the resolution called for the abolition of the county’s grant program in favor of a semi-autonomous grant foundation and added that ‘‘no new funding requests from non-profit organizations for county grant funding shall be processed until the new Community Foundation Program is established.”
The news hit the county’s nonprofit community like a tsunami.
Nonprofit leaders believed that the county would take all of its grant money and funnel it toward the fledgling Community Foundation of Charles County for distribution. This perception was both perpetuated and complicated by a series of contradictory statements from county officials.
The week after the resolution was issued, nonprofit leaders filled the commissioners’ meeting room and dragged the new board across the rhetorical coals, at one point accusing the commissioners of ‘‘washing your hands of your responsibility to our sector.”
The fierce response caused the commissioners to back away from their resolution. By the next month, they appointed a Non-Profit Grants Advisory Panel to vet nonprofit applications for grant money. The panel was composed of many of the same nonprofit leaders who protested the resolution.
The commissioners pledged to nonprofit leaders that any foundation plan would go forward with the blessing and guidance of the nonprofit community.
They then embarked on a series of visits to local organizations to review their operations and learn their needs.
The advisory panel got off to an uneven start, as many organizations were confused by the county’s new grant application. The county was also slow in releasing grant money to organizations after the turn of the fiscal year.
In order to simplify the grant process, the advisory panel refined the application for fiscal year 2009, and the commissioners adopted it in September.
Jay Friess
Playing catch-up
It is not disputed by local officials that there is a need to build a new school every year, but what has become clear over the past year is the state will not fund its share of that plan.
Thus, the school system earlier this year backed off on its plans to build a new school every year for the next two decades to cope with continued enrollment growth and overcrowded schools.
Superintendent James E. Richmond said earlier this year that the school system needs four or five new schools just to catch up.
For the current school year, 24 of the school system’s 35 schools are over the capacity limits set by the state.
During the 2006-07 school year, 22 percent of county students were being taught in trailers, a number that will only rise as the number of trailers will go from 222 to 253 by this school year’s end.
While Charles County only saw an increase of 53 students for the current school year, Charles schools have seen an influx of almost 4,000 new students since the 1999-2000 school year.
The county foresaw that the state is not likely to fund their share for any new projects, roughly 50 percent when all said and done, for the upcoming fiscal year since state agencies are so backlogged on how much they owe for other projects.
The state still owes Charles County $6 million for Theodore G. Davis Middle School, which opened in August and $12 million for Mary Burgess Neal Elementary, which will open in August 2008.
Since the county has never received $18 million from the state for school construction projects, the amount they are still owed for the two schools; funding for another new school was unlikely, so school officials didn’t ask.
For the current fiscal year, which began July 1, the school system received $13.2 million for school construction projects. This number is inflated and not likely to be matched for fiscal 2009 since O’Malley has promised to dedicate $100 million less to school construction projects for the upcoming year — $300 million instead of $400 million.
Recent history shows Charles County typically receives 3.2 percent of the total amount allotted.
Three schools have been built since Charles County began its initiative of building a school a year — North Point High School in 2005, William A. Diggs Elementary School in 2006 and Theodore G. Davis Middle School in 2007.
Charles County funded Diggs completely on its own with no funding from the state.
Before the system takes a year off from opening a new school, Neal elementary will open in August on Piney Church Road in Waldorf.
No new school will open for the 2009-10 school year. A new elementary school is scheduled to open in August 2010 and a new high school in 2011-12. Then, no new school in 2012-13.
Charles County school officials have said the new high school is already full — and it hasn’t even opened yet.
Jacqueline Rabe
