A Road's Coming Through

Eve Burton and Roger Metcalf had planned to raise their family in the Derwood home they've shared for 23 years. They've added on to the house as new children arrived, and they love its surroundings: an acre full of mature trees, blueberry bushes and woodpeckers.

Burton said she never dreamed of leaving a place that is so full of memories, including the planting of crape myrtle trees as a Mother's Day gift 10 years ago.

Soon, however, their piece of quiet country life may be paved over with six lanes of asphalt. If it is built along the path preferred by the Maryland State Highway Administration, an intercounty connector would carry thousands of trucks and cars through what is now Burton and Metcalf's living room.

State highway officials have promised that people living in the highway's path will be fairly compensated to allow them to find comparable housing elsewhere. Burton and some of her neighbors in the Cashell Estates neighborhood say that's impossible.

"There is no comparable housing," said Burton, 52, who runs children's programs at Twinbrook Library. "Our home is two blocks from a bus stop, two miles from a Metro station, three miles from where my husband works and five miles from where I work. We've lived here 23 years. Everything we do is in this area."

One month after Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) announced the state's preferred route for an intercounty connector, many Montgomery County residents are taking a closer look at exactly where it would go. For many who drive, thoughts of a new highway conjure hopeful images of a faster crossing of the county's midsection. For some residents, however, plans for the toll road would send bulldozers through their front doors or leave them with a potentially noisy, smelly highway next door.

The 18-mile intercounty connector is estimated to cost $2.4 billion, not including financing costs. It would be the most expensive new highway project in the Washington area. Most of Maryland's preferred southern route has been on planning maps for decades. The highway would connect Interstate 270 in Gaithersburg with U.S. Route 1 in Laurel.

Neil J. Pedersen, Maryland's highway administrator, said that the state tries to avoid taking homes when designing a new road but that the task of sparing homes is difficult in densely populated areas, such as Montgomery and Prince George's counties. The state's chosen route for a connector would require taking as many as 58 homes, with the vast majority in Montgomery, Pedersen said.

"In terms of roadways of this magnitude, there are many that have numbers [of displaced homes] that are far higher than this," Pedersen said. "I think that's really a tribute to the planning processes of both counties having proactively preserved the area" where most of the connector would be built.

Pedersen noted that building a wider and higher Woodrow Wilson Bridge required condemning an Alexandria apartment community with 300 units.

Few Montgomery neighborhoods would be affected as much as Cashell Estates off Redland Road, about three miles east of Interstate 270 and just south of Muncaster Mill Road. By Metcalf's count, 16 of the estimated 58 homes that the state wants to take would come from Cashell Estates or the adjacent Winters Run neighborhood. If homes that are vacant or already state-owned are excluded, he said, 44 homes would be taken, with one-third of them in Cashell Estates and Winters Run.

Some residents who face displacement are putting their hopes in the fact that the highway isn't a done deal. The federal government must still agree to the state's preferred route this fall as well as the connector's financing plan, which the Maryland General Assembly has approved. Environmental groups have said they are considering filing lawsuits, which could delay construction. Ehrlich has said he wants to get bulldozers moving next year, so that the highway can be opened by 2010.