ICC: Lessons from our neighbors

All: I am meeting tomorrow with Connie McKenna, who lives on Briardale and is on the board of the Shady Grove Woods HOA. I think she will have lots of valuable and useful information as we move forward on this. In the meantime, here is an op-ed she wrote in the Washington Post back in July:


Don't Take Our Yards
The ICC Plans Are Overrunning Derwood

Sunday, July 23, 2006; B08

Most of us in Derwood have done our homework on the planned intercounty connector because our town is slated to be the ICC entry point. This summer we've watched Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan ram through the approvals before the November elections. We've seen surveyors' plastic ribbons fluttering in our woods. We've blanched as the state pushes forward on eminent-domain seizure of homes in nearby Cashell Estates.

But no one told us that a midnight confiscation of our private property was in the plan.

My neighbors received "takings" notification letters from the State Highway Administration on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. No map was included and no details given on square footage. A few days later an appraiser arrived in back yards and reported that the SHA would cut checks in August.

Our homeowners' association was alarmed to suddenly see on the appraiser's map that the new ICC right of way includes not only parts of our yards but also two parcels of our common land, even though we've received no notification. Melinda Peters, the ICC project director, confirmed that we were on the list. She responded to our questions by saying that we should have known that the proposed ICC right-of-way boundaries would cut into our yards. Maps available at public hearings and on the SHA Web site told the story, she said, but she admitted that the plans are "something an engineer can decipher much more easily than a person looking at a map."

This approach sets a very high bar of government reliance on citizen initiative to defend something we all take for granted: our yards. The state, it turns out, fingered our land at least 18 months ago. But we didn't get official notice until the federal government approved ICC plans last month.

Really, they could have given us a heads-up.

The state is moving so quickly now that all this occurred before the Montgomery County Planning Board signed off on the state's current ICC plans. On the afternoon of July 13, the county board, in its single public hearing on ICC construction and design, listened to citizens' angry protests. Homeowners challenged the state's rushed process and its plan to leave the actual design of the road to private contractors. The "parkway-like" ICC we've been promised is really a cloverleaf-heavy, interstate-like juggernaut. For the first time the planning commissioners heard about the property seizures on Briardale Road. My neighbors and I showed up, hoping the county could negotiate to hold back the state's bulldozers.

The next day The Post reported that 350 property seizure letters had gone out last month to people who live on the ICC right of way. Among them are my neighbors, the McCarthys. When their nature-loving son was killed in a car accident 12 years ago, they scattered his ashes in their back yard. That private space is now slated for seizure.

At the county's Planning Board session Thursday, the commissioners were squirming. Only one, however, voted against approving the state's ICC plans. The others said that their hands were tied by the board's advisory status. They offered no remedy for the homeowners whose property will be confiscated.

Some of the affected people stood in the back of the hall, quietly telling their stories to each other. An immigrant on Norbeck will lose his entire front yard. "I wish they'd take my house because I'll never be able to sell it now," he said. A Derwood couple closed on a new home days before they received their "takings" letter; now they're paying two mortgages because they can't sell the house that's losing part of its back yard. And there are the McCarthys, forced to publicly revisit their grief in the hope of preserving the sanctuary they never wanted to share.

The county Planning Board and the State Highway Administration clearly share the McCarthys' aversion to publicity. But there are plenty of similarly wrenching stories now along the state's proposed ICC right of way. Perhaps if more are known, officials will call off their bulldozers.

-- Connie McKenna, Derwood, is vice president of the Shady Grove Woods Home Owners Association.