A Fight Over Space

Signs beckon drivers to visit the newest development — the wooded lots of Wharf Creek, the large parcels at Meadow Run, the Lakeshore Windemere.

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Raw lumber, uncut wood and half-built houses dot the landscape, and the smell of fresh paint still lingers nearby. Signs of growth and development fill every essence of this stretch of road.

 

To the unknowing, the area would seem like an up-and-coming neighborhood, a young new city ripe for development. But this is Mountain Road. It’s an area already crowded with people and cars, one already reaching critical proportions of growth, one prompting many politicians and residents to a fever pitch in fighting more development.

 

Despite a one-year building moratorium on Mountain Road – the second such ban in the last three years – and desperate attempts to save more open space, houses are still going up on the peninsula.

 

The county doesn’t track building permits for specific areas, so it’s impossible to know exactly how manty permits have been issued for the Mountain Road peninsula in the past year.

 

But figures from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council show 47 house building permits were issued in 1`997 in the area. Figures for 1998 are not yet available.

 

The result? A still-lingering controversy over how to address the area’s crowding. And the moratorium, which expired at the end of December, has pitted politicians and residents against developers, leaving many Mountain Road landowners somewhere in the middle.

 

“Every piece of property is owned by somebody,” said John Morris, a spokesman for the county’s land use office. “You can regulate what they do with their property, but you can’t deny what they do with their property.”

 

The county’s adequacy of facilities law requires enough infrastructure to support an incoming development. Schools would have to be able to support more students, more roads and more traffic and the sewer and water supplies would have to be installed by developers. But in recent years, housing projects have still been approved on the peninsula because developers have been able to secure waivers to the law.

 

To some, that means the adequate facilities law failed.

 

“The adequate facilities law was a joke and was never enforced on the Mountain Road peninsula,” said Carolyn Roeding, a community activist and vice president of the Greater Pasadena Council. “The fix is no development until the roads and the schools and the situation is made better.”

 

Damage control

That fix could come in the form of the newest moratorium bill introduced before the County Council by Councilman A. Shirley Murphy, D-Pasadena.

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The bill would continue last year’s mortarium on subdividing by developers but would allow family subdivisions, which tend to be one to three houses.

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But it’s drawing staunch criticism from the developers of the proposed 18-home Saybrooke Woods, the only major developer affected by the bill, and from the Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce, which cautions the bill may be overrated.

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“It purports to stopping the subdivision process, but that doesn’t do anything about building permits,” said Fred Sussman, chairman of the chamber’s government relations committee and an attorney with a private Annapolis practice.

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Houses that have appeared since the moratorium went into effect include the 24-house Wharf Creek and the 19-home Meadow Run developments, as well as several individual houses. And since many of those houses still stand empty, the full effect may not have been felt.

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Even if the council does pass the moratorium bill on Tuesday, the lingering problem of traffic on Mountain Road looms.

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During the previous County Council’s term, debate raged between widening the road or building a bypass, an idea introduced by former councilman Thomas W. Redmond Sr. and supported by former county executive John G. Gary Jr.

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With their defeat in last year’s election, the bypass solution has all but disappeared from the agendas of local politicians, and the reversible lanes idea –endorsed by state lawmakers – has popped up as a temporary fix.

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The reversible land system should be up and running this spring, and that could provide the fix that would make the moratorium obsolete.

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But politicians point to the moratorium bill as the turning point for the problems of Mountain Road. The bill has newly elected politicians rallying behind the same cause – reversible lanes – instead of tackling the problems from different sides, said Philip C. Jimeno D-Brooklyn Park.

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“There’s a general consensus (among area politicians) that we have to control growth,” he said. “For the first time, we all seem to be in step – that there’s a vision, there’s a plan with what we want to do with this peninsula,” he said.

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But that won’t stop the growth that’s happened so far. Now, it’s down to damage control.

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“We can’t stop what’s going on now,” Mr. Jimeno said, but what the county can do is develop a long-term growth plan, enforce the adequate facilities law and work on the Magothy River Greenway.

 

Tough choices

The very solutions to the traffic problems and the development already under way may open the door to more development.

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The reversible lanes may turn out to be only a temporary fix – politicians may again have to turn to either widening the road or building a bypass.

The bypass as proposed by Mr. Redmond would but through land south of Mountain Road. Adding lanes to Mountain Road would chop land off on both sides of the road.

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As Philip Dibben watched the Meadow Run subdivision take shape across the road from his thoroughbred farm las year, he watched his hopes of an easy solution to the traffic problems slip away.

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His farm faces Mountain Road, and the new subdivision, he said, lessens the chance a bypass would be built and enhances the probability that Mountain Road would be widened, cutting off part of his farm.

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“It will put us out of business. If we lose the front, we’ll have to move,” he said, vowing to fight any road widening in court.

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He’s not the only one who would move if a road came through. Henry Schmidt owns a 100-acre farm adjacent to the planned Fort Smallwood golf course and community.

 

Originally, developers had talked about putting a connector road to Mountain Road that would cut through Mr. Schmidt’s property. That plan has been put on hold, but could happen sometime in the future, said Thomas L. Donlin, project manager with the Department of Recreation and Parks.

 

But with the surveyor’s stakes marking the road, Mr. Schmidt’s decision is clear if the road becomes reality – but his losses and leave.

“if this thing goes through, I would take my family and move and develop the rest of the land,” he said.

 

He’s seen growth encroach steadily onto the peninsula, so it’s no surprise to him, even though he never thought he’d sell the family farm.

“Growth is inevitable. If someone doesn’t buy land for open spaces, eventually all of it will be developed,” Mr. Schmidt said.

 

Greener pastures

That’s what local politicians hope to prevent by creating a Magothy River Greenway.

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The greenway took shape last year, with local politicians, including Del. Joan Cadden, D-Brooklyn Park, pushing to preserve green space along the Magothy River watershed.

 

A major parcel of the 1,000-acre preservation remained missing, though, until just las month when the developers with a contract on a 600-acre parcel of land backed out because of the proposed moratorium.

 

If a deal between the owner of the land, Beverly Looper, and the county and state can be worked out, it will preserve a major portion of land on North Shore Drive.

 

That, at least, is lending hope to an area increasingly bogged down by problems, from more development looming to a true fix for Mountain Road traffic.

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Originally published Feb. 10, 1999