Mapping Out a Future For Southern Maryland

"I want you to throw out all your notions of how the land is zoned," announced John W. Frece, associate director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, before the exercise began. "Visualize how you would like to see this growth spread across the map."

Each table featured a mix of developers, preservationists, elected officials and private business people from the three Southern Maryland counties. Each participant came to the table with his or her own vision of what Southern Maryland could look like in 2030. Each group was charged with working toward a communal vision.

"This is an excellent exercise," said Canavan as he fitted Legos inside the grids representing Lexington Park. "But what you tend to lose with the Legos is a sense of intensity."

Each four-pegged Lego was as small as a piece of Starburst candy, but represented 160 acres of land as well as 520 households or 470 jobs, depending on color. Yellow pieces equaled workforce housing, black was very low-density housing, white was all other types of housing and blue was commercial and industrial.

The location of the Legos varied from group to group, but most concentrated the bulk of growth around existing town centers: Waldorf, Lexington Park, Prince Frederick. Charlotte Hall also received a significant Lego allotment.

Conversation at some tables got into details that, although not germane to the exercise, were provocative: the threat of a water supply shortage, the aesthetics of the interplay between housing and infrastructure (such as roads and water lines), the flight of young people from the Southern Maryland workforce, the eventual need for a light-rail system.

Most people haggled over these issues, but everyone agreed on at least two things: Growth needs to be addressed on a regional level, and it needs to be mediated with respect to environmentally sensitive areas.

Table 10 facilitator Trina Wacasey, a training manager at Texas A&M University, said it was fascinating to see her group cram the existing town centers with Legos in an effort to preserve the map's green areas.

"I can understand the desire to protect the open space," she said. "Yesterday, I went from National Airport with all that congestion, and I sat in traffic for two hours until I got to Waldorf. Once we got to Maryland 5, it was beautiful and green and open and hilly."

NG&O Engineering Inc. engineer Brenice Crissman, unconvinced the exercise had a practical purpose, didn't think there could be a suitable compromise between rural preservation and the intensity of growth projected by the state planning department.

"You can't have it both ways," Crissman said. "You can't have convenience and affordability, and have preservation."

While the participants ate lunch during a break in the day-long exercise, facilitators translated each table's Lego-ridden maps into numbers and grids. At the end of the day, preliminary results and averages were presented by Gerrit Knaap, executive director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.

"Compared with existing conditions, you envision a future with more development in PFAs [Priority Funding Areas], greater protection of resource lands and open space, a greater jobs-housing balance and greater regional cooperation," Knaap said after presenting color-coded three-dimensional maps of Southern Maryland in the year 2030, as posited by the participants.

In September, Reality Check Plus will publish a packet of material that combines the results from each of the four regional exercises into a statewide vision of projected growth.