Mapping Out a Future For Southern Maryland

About 150 people attended a Reality Check Plus event aimed at managing projected business and housing growth. (Photos By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

It was like a convention of Risk players.

Serious folks -- bent over maps, brows furrowed -- moved pieces around, surrendering and buttressing domains. But the objective of the game was to manage growth in Southern Maryland, not to take over the globe.

From appearances, though, the stakes might have been just as high at Table 10, one of 15 spread out in the gymnasium at St. Mary's College of Maryland, where about 150 community, government and business leaders sparred last Thursday over the allocation of projected growth in the region.

The event was the last of four such regional exercises sponsored by Reality Check Plus, a privately funded coalition dedicated to creating a vision of how Maryland should look in 30 years, and then identifying policies to achieve that vision.

"Look at that," lamented Millie Kriemelmeyer, pointing to a crop of white Lego pieces that Derek Watson placed around the Newburg side of the Gov. Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge on the Charles County map.

The Legos represented an army of new homes and jobs. Kriemelmeyer, a trustee of the Cove Point Natural Heritage Trust, was doubtful that the infrastructure, let alone the ecosystem, could handle it.

"Who knows a bridge builder?" she called out as she went to get a drink.

"There you go," ribbed Watson, a general manager at Chaney Enterprises, a Waldorf construction materials company. "I'm going to get rid of all the black pieces while you get your water."

Across the table, Karen Edgecombe sat at the northern end of Calvert County. She grouped single white Legos (low-density housing) around North Beach and folded her arms.

"I'm not happy putting any more down," said Edgecombe, executive director of the American Chestnut Land Trust.

"And I understand and respect your position," said Denis Canavan, director of the Department of Land Use and Growth Management in St. Mary's County, as he plunked a spire of blue Legos on Lexington Park.

There are 78,000 households and 71,000 jobs coming to Southern Maryland over the next 25 years, according to projections by the Maryland Department of Planning. Working with those estimates, each group of eight to 10 people received Lego pieces that had to be placed somewhere on a table-sized map of Southern Maryland.