EchoVibe

Janice Lynch Schuster is a freelance writer who lives in Riva.

For years, I paid scant attention to development in my area of Anne Arundel County, popularly known as South County, which spans the suburban and rural communities south of the South River, from Edgewater and Riva to Deale and Rose Haven. Many lie along the Chesapeake Bay, some are still rural, and many are home to commuters who work in the Washington region.

In the decades since I moved here from College Park, the area has exploded: Roads are jammed, schools are packed, and strip malls dot busy thoroughfares. Like other counties, development seems to have run amok. But in Anne Arundel, which before last year had several successive Republican county executives, development had quite a hand in government.

I tended to notice development only in my backyard (OIMBY?), a small water-privileged community on the South River where residents share a playground and fishing pier. When my husband and I bought our home in 1997, the waterfront homes consisted primarily of old beach bungalows whose residents had lived in them for decades or newcomers with small families. The one road into the neighborhood featured older homes hidden in the woods. As older residents moved away or as families needed more space, the look of the community changed. Today, we are a community of waterfront McMansions, designed and built to consume every last bit of land and, with that, the water views. Worse were the way these houses consumed territory once inhabited by heron and osprey, deer and foxes.

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These houses always required zoning modifications. Residents’ complaints to the county seemed to go unnoticed. Developers never seemed to care about the harm done to the environment. It took nothing, it seemed, to obtain variances to build.

According to Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, a Democrat who has been in office for a year, those modifications were easy to obtain. Pittman explained, “The county had a strange system where there was no planning board. It had an outdated code that would prevent development from happening, but projects got modifications to get around it.

“The planning officer approved what the county executive said to approve. And campaign contributions to county council members and the county executive came from developers ... The county executive had way too much power.”

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Rampant development has had an effect on the entire county, especially in areas where highway and road capacity has not kept pace with commuter needs. Congestion on Routes 3/301 in Gambrills and Crofton, where commercial and residential development have been extensive, creates daily travel headaches for drivers. Ditto for the stretch known as Ritchie Highway that connects Annapolis to the Baltimore Beltway. The environmental effect is significant. Pittman said, “Since 2010 Anne Arundel has had the number one forest lost in the state due to development — 40 percent of the loss has been in Anne Arundel County, even though we are less than 5 percent of the land mass. We have more construction sites with open erosion and sediment than any other county in the state.”

In a swift change of policy and practice, Pittman’s first year in office has included major changes in how developers operate in the county. In addition to instructing the planning officer not to approve requests with an environmental impact, Pittman’s administration authored the forest conservation bill, passed in November by the county council.

“That sent shock waves through development community. We made it difficult to cut down forests. We are sending a signal that we are trying to take control of how growth happens in our county,” Pittman said.

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Putting an end to development meant a tax increase for Anne Arundel, but Pittman cites a September poll from the county’s community college in which 70 percent of those surveyed supported such an increase. “Our services hadn’t kept pace with development, and we had to catch up,” he said.

Meanwhile, developers remain unhappy about the change in business and threaten to develop elsewhere. Pittman’s response is, “Go for it. Other counties have stricter regulations. They say they’ll go to Baltimore City. Well, that city needs development. We want to drive development to Glen Burnie and Brooklyn Park where we need redevelopment.”

I realize that my small concerns about development in my neighborhood must grow to reflect larger concerns about development throughout the county. Loving nature is no longer enough to preserve and protect for the future. A long-term, community-wide vision that sees the importance of the whole ecosystem is critical.

Read more:

John Wennersten: The Chesapeake watershed’s countryside is being replaced by ‘mallside’

Thomas Giammo: The benefits of suburban sprawl

Salim Furth: How to fix two D.C. development headaches

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