Even Wal-Mart Would Improve Parole
Dear Bay Weekly:
I’m usually one to cheer along with your weekly editorial, but it seems as though there is a special hatred for Wal-Mart [May 18-24: Wal-Mart Dumbs Down Smart Growth.”]
I would like to first say that I am not happy with Wal-Mart’s history of steam-rolling communities and their lack of environmental considerations.
However, the concern that Wal-Mart’s cookie-cutter architecture will spoil the view of Parole is laughable. Has anyone actually walked around there lately? It’s a mess. There’s broken glass everywhere, garbage and who knows what you will find in the corners. Even though I am a relative newcomer to Annapolis (12 years), I would not consider the Parole area to be a shining example of what the Annapolis community would like to reflect.
If, as mentioned in the editorial, the city planners have been hoping for a “pedestrian-friendly” shopping center, then they should get off the pot and do it. The area has been in a steady decline since I arrived. I have noticed that some trees have been planted on the perimeter of the parking lot on the Route 2 and Riva Road sides. However, if things continue to go at the rate they’ve been going, Wal-Mart in the place of the current shopping area would be, on the basis of physical ugliness only, a vast improvement.
—Belinda Tuton, Annapolis
Radical Bird-Cage Filler
Dear Bay Weekly:
Your story [June 8-14: “In Deale, Safeway Scores on a Technicality”] shows that your paper is more interested in reporting items by radicals than the facts. You wasted more than two inches of column space on some absurd opening that was also bias [sic]. If you continue that, then your weekly is good for nothing more than bird-cage filler.
As your article stated, there are many residents happy that Safeway is coming. Yet you failed to quote one of them.
If Amanda Spake does not realize that Safeway would bring a savings to the general public, then I would not want to do the books for her business. This area sadly lacks a competitive grocery store and a decent pharmacy. The landscape and development of this project is more in tune with the natural environment than the two strip malls along Deale-Churchton Road
If you notice, the people expounding the terror that a Safeway would bring to the area are not farmers or watermen. Many are transplants.
Where are these great champions when the pleasure boating marinas add more slips and the oil and gasoline spillage affects the Bay in many more ways than a parking lot?
This area has expanded. Let us work together as a community and we can control the development and bring in necessary stores. We’ve a chance to get something the residents need, yet some self-serving individuals, like Michael Shay (who is neither a waterman or farmer) want to prevent.
Please report your news fairly in the future.
—Katherine E. Ostrowski, Churchton
Copyright 2000
Bay Weekly
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