Howard Growth Confronted

Developments Met With New Surge in Activism

There was no one

moment when Frank Martin realized that his life in Howard County had spun off in a new and probably irreversible direction.

It could have been the nine-hour zoning board hearing last year, in which the final vote against new housing in downtown Columbia came at 4:20 a.m. Maybe it was school officials referring to new houses as "student generators." Perhaps it was the Rouse Co.'s push to change Merriweather Post Pavilion, a much-loved landmark, with an enclosed, more upscale concert hall.

Or maybe it was all of that.

These days Martin, who moved to Howard as a young boy with his parents in 1968, spends half of his time away from his day job selling homes. He often visits the county's offices in Ellicott City and spends hundreds of hours with other residents studying land-use policy, soil testing, traffic and school census counts.

"I am fed up, and I am not going to take it anymore," Martin said, laughingly paraphrasing Howard Beale, anchorman in the 1970s movie "Network" and a symbol of popular rage against corporate greed.

Until recently, Howard County seemed a safe distance from the grinding disputes over development that have been a fact of life for decades in other communities. The county is tucked into a rural enclave off Interstate 95 between Washington and Baltimore, endowed with one of the country's highest median incomes ($88,500), and many residents believed that runaway growth and its discontents were other people's problems.

Martin and others say there is a new reality in Howard, and they are finding a collective voice to convey their fear that the county is veering off course.

Chief among the issues: traffic, especially at key intersections where volume is exceeding capacity. Main routes in and out of Howard are jammed to Washington and Baltimore during rush hours. The much-admired public school system has several elementary schools that are crowded.

"People didn't move here to be in Baltimore or Washington. If they did, that's where they would live. These people could afford to live anywhere," Martin said.

Howard's evolution from farmland to suburb was guided in large measure by James Rouse, the pioneering developer and driving force behind the planned community of Columbia. Rouse won special zoning rules for the unincorporated town that became the county's commercial and population center. He also set a standard for preservation of greenery and open space that residents have come to expect.

In the 1990s, when Columbia was mostly completed, politicians and planners moved to protect the rural western part of the county by barring extension of water and sewer lines to the region. It forced growth to the east of Route 108, near I-95 and Route 1.