Aiming at the wrong target

Our Opinion

Friday, Aug. 21, 2009

Commissioner Gary Hodge, whose quotation that is above, delivered in a letter to the editor in Wednesday's paper, would have the citizens of Charles County believe that the "no-growth extremists" do, at least with the Maryland Department of the Environment. Hodge and the aforementioned group engaged in a little hardball politics recently, holding a meeting they ended up closing to the public to concoct a legal strategy to prevent the department from requiring more information from the county on the commissioners' pet project, the cross-county connector. They played the victim — we're put upon because the mean old MDE wants more information — then the bully — and we'll sue you if you don't fall into line.

Really, it's almost unseemly to say that people like Sen. Thomas "Mac" Middleton, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Murray D. Levy, one of the House's budget mavens and the vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Transportation and (wait for it) the Environment have less political influence than the three or four organized groups of local activists who oppose the connector. Both of those committees have a huge influence on the budget of MDE. Both of those lawmakers have a huge influence in those committees. Are we really supposed to believe they're running scared?

And those activists are hardly extremists and hardly believe that no growth should happen. They are squarely in the mainstream of the county — judging by a recent poll, our letters page and the approval in the nation as a whole for "green" initiatives — and they believe in transit-oriented growth that preserves natural resources.

The political elite of Charles County says the MDE has violated state laws and/or its own rules by requiring more information; they haven't said what those rules, specifically, are.

They say the county has spent $650,000 gathering information for the approval process, as if that figure is somehow, magically, enough. Though the Intercounty Connector project now being built in Montgomery County is larger — 18 miles, more lanes, more wetlands crossings — Montgomery County and state highway agencies spent many, many millions on the studies, and saw two applications for approval fail before the OK was given. Given that history, the current MDE actions seem downright accommodating.

And really, the whole effort is aimed at the wrong target. MDE will not make the final recommendation on whether to approve the connector, nor indeed on what information will finally be required to meet the qualifications for approval; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will make those determinations, and they aren't talking, to us at least, about what they might do.

We have gone on record in this space before as supporting an environmental impact statement, the federal document that the corps must request, that is generally used as the instrument to get projects like the connector approved, and we take the opportunity here to do so again. True, EISs are expensive, but in a story in the Independent Nov. 21, 2008, commissioners' President F. Wayne Cooper estimated the cost at $250,000 to $350,000, or a little more than double or triple the amount spent on the commissioners' nifty new auditorium. Is that really too much money to spend to make sure the county's vital environmental resources are protected?