Residents Fear Connector Will Consume All Highway Funds

Michael S. Smith doesn't live near the proposed intercounty connector. He doesn't work near it. The Southern Maryland resident figures he'll probably never even drive on the highway that would cut across Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

But whenever he ponders the project's $2.4 billion price tag, sometimes while he's stuck on the clogged and aging roads around his home, Smith grows irate.

"When are the folks in Annapolis going to pay attention to the roads down here?" said Smith, 48, whose 50-minute daily commute takes him from Dunkirk in Calvert County to Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Mary's. "Everyone on the outskirts," he said, is cheated by the connector deal.

He is not alone. Disgruntled commuters and lawmakers across the state are increasingly fearful that the east-west connector may soak up so much of the state's federal highway money that it delays badly needed transportation projects elsewhere.

"There will be dozens of projects that will never see the light of day because of the intercounty connector," said Del. Peter Franchot (D-Montgomery), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on transportation and a supporter of the project. "After the ICC, there will just be no money."

More than $30 billion worth of unfunded projects across the state -- from highway upgrades on the Eastern Shore to new bypasses in Western Maryland -- could face delays or might never be built because of the connector's drain on funding, Franchot estimated.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Robert L. Flanagan vigorously denied that the connector would delay other projects. He said more than $1 billion of the highway's costs will be covered by toll revenue and new funding sources.

"It is not a zero-sum game," he said.

Some lawmakers, however, are not so sure. One of the most controversial parts of the project's financing is a plan to issue $750 million of a relatively new kind of bond that would be paid off with future federal highway funds over the next 12 years.

The General Assembly voted this spring to limit how much the state could borrow using this mechanism. Still, as much as 18.5 percent of annual federal highway funds received over that period would be committed to paying off the bonds, known as Garvee bonds, said David Juppe, senior operating budget manager for the General Assembly's Office of Policy Analysis.

It's hard to pin down what projects might be affected. The state's $12.3 billion highway plan includes 123 new projects. Scores of others are waiting to be added.

"If the ICC hadn't been built, you probably would have seen a lot of other smaller projects being funded," Juppe said. "But it's hard to say which projects those would be."