Impact statement is sensible way to examine connector issues

Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008

But I am puzzled over the paper’s repetition of the developers’ recurrent talking point — that the packed July 31 public hearing on the highway proposal was out of control. Besides being untruthful, this point is irrelevant. The federal regulators are not going to grant a permit to destroy wetlands in Mattawoman Creek watershed on the basis that project supporters felt that project opponents were too rowdy. Perhaps the aim is to tag highway opponents as a ‘‘lunatic fringe,” as said by a member of the Charles County Planning Commission who spoke out at the hearing and in a letter to the editor.

Perhaps they fear that the already large number of highway opponents will grow exponentially, and that tarring them will discourage the movement against the highway. Does he, and other employees of the county government who testified, consider the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, whose presentation against the highway was perhaps the strongest, the ‘‘lunatic fringe”?

The smear won’t work. An over-capacity crowd attended the hearing in the county government auditorium during vacation time, was overwhelmingly in favor of an EIS, in agreement with the county’s mainline newspaper. Policy makers know that numbers like this are only the tip of the iceberg, hardly a fringe.

The hearing was in fact stacked toward proponents of the highway. It was held on the home base of the applicant — our local government — and the first portion of the hearing was turned over to them. Their friends in the developers’ camp cheered them before the highway opponents got to cheer their champions. There were just more of us, lots more.

But let’s get back to real topics. The pro-highway people had one main theme, an emotional appeal along the lines that because Billingsley Road can be dangerous, people who oppose the new highway are indifferent to safety.

The problem with this argument is that the applicant for the permit, our county government, makes no logical case as to how building the new highway would increase safety. In fact, as reported by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, studies show that construction of new highways increases traffic on surrounding roads. In this case it would certainly be the case, as the whole point is to open up virgin territory for development and to replace one-stoplight Bryans Road with a new edge city. So we would have even more accidents on Billingsley Road, and a whole new category of accidents on the new highway.

In a time when all across our nation individuals and businesses are having to come to grips with the fact that energy prices are not going down, and that sprawl development is therefore becoming economically unviable, our local government and developers refuse to see the handwriting on the wall.

This proposal won’t fly. We need a viable alternative for our future, one that ties residences and employment centers to rail. This approach will greatly reduce environmental impacts and is possible in the Waldorf plan for light rail connection to the Branch Avenue Metro station.

A fully scoped EIS is the sensible and accepted way to examine issues like safety and many other problems associated with major highway proposals like the cross-county connector extension. And it should be conducted by impartial parties, not consultants hired by the pro-highway local government, which is how present documents were produced.

Irene A Larson, La Plata