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Coming to Calvert County: Comprehensive Sprawl
Dear Bay Weekly:
It is a plan, because so much thought and discourse went into it. It is comprehensive, because it is loaded with the hopes and wishes of citizens, planning staff and commissioners over the several years of its creation. The Comprehensive Plan for future development of Calvert County is ours. Tinkering is not allowed. Wholesale ignoring of its principles is not an option. Or so we thought!
The Calvert County Commissioners are about to make a decision to extend water/sewer resources to land outside of three northern town centers, changing commercial development potential forever.
No one should expect the developers to do anything but use resources made legally available. That’s what they do.
No one should expect Giant, a foreign corporation and potential tenant, to honor our hard-fought Town Center principle and the Comprehensive Plan.
Every knowledgeable voter, however, should expect that the commissioners, voted (or appointed) to office on the wings of public sentiment for planned growth, would honor that trust.
The 14 (or more) parcels of ground outside of town centers, and Dunkirk, are dominos. Expect consequences: dispersed development, residential and commercial, and new traffic risks throughout the county.
If the commissioners choose to ignore the tenets of the Comprehensive Plan, shouldn’t the owners of that plan get their say first, before the next election?
— Leo Mallard, Chesapeake Beach
Editor’s Note: Watch for more on this issue.
Dispatches from the Osprey Trail
Dear Bay Weekly:
We’ve had bad news along with good news. The bad news is that one female did not make it across the Caribbean. We don’t know what happened, but she almost certainly landed on a boat about 100 miles north of her destination in Venezuela. Her route took a sharp turn west before she got to South America, and then for a couple of days we got signals from her moving slowly west. The pattern of the movement (stopping and starting) suggests that she wasn’t perched on something drifting in the current, so we can only guess it was a fishing boat.
Whatever it was, her radio went silent on September 14, and we haven’t had a signal from her since. She may have been shot or simply been too exhausted from the trip across the Caribbean to make it any farther. The boat she was on was out over very deep water, where it is very hard (but not impossible) for ospreys to catch fish.
Our other birds are okay. Ms. Charlotte is on her wintering grounds in the Peruvian Amazon basin. KD, a female tagged on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard, is safe and sound on Hispaniola, probably thinking about trying the long flight to South America again. HX, our Martha’s Vineyard male that we’re following for a second migration, is only five miles from where he started his northbound migration on March 24!
Peace,
— Rob Bierregaard, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Editor’s Note: Since August, we’ve been following the migration of several East Coast osprey. Here, the scientist who maps the Osprey Trail catches us up on their continent hopping. You can follow along on-line at www.birdsofprey.org (click ‘migration’) with maps and descriptions of each bird’s journey.
We welcome your letters and opinions. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, P.O. Box 358, Deale, MD 20751 E-mail them to us at [email protected].
Copyright 2001
Bay Weekly
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