LISTEN TO GREG SMITH
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You can’t Save the Bay and Pave the Watershed at the same time. – Greg Smith
“My greatest regret is that we didn’t raise our voices higher more often and that we didn’t block bulldozers,” said Greg Smith, an activist who fought for nearly twenty years to stop the construction of the Intercounty Connector. At 6 AM this morning, the first 7.2 miles of the 18.8-mile highway was scheduled to open for traffic. “The only thing that would have stopped this highway would have been… the kind of campaign that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi would have run, which is to shame these people and to make them look in the faces of the families whose homes they were destroying.”
The Washington Post noted, “When the first segment of a controversial new highway that will connect Montgomery and Prince George’s counties open… Maryland will have built what was once considered impossible in Washington’s congested suburbs: a six-lane, multibillion-dollar toll road across fragile streams, a stone’s throw from hundreds of homes. The full cost of the Intercounty Connector – the exchange of woodlands for asphalt; the effects on residents along its path; debt payments that could require raising tolls throughout the state – will be analyzed for years.”
“It’s pathetic that [Maryland Governor] Martin O’Malley would put his political ambitions ahead of public health and the environment and the facts and the fiscal soundness of the state,” Smith said at the ICC’s ribbon cutting on Monday while holding a sign that read “Martin O’Malley – Completing the Bush-Ehrlich Agenda.” “O’Malley is blowing $3 billion on an innerstate highway that every study since the 1990s has shown will not relieve congestion to any [significant] degree, but will increase congestion on major commuter routes.
“That money should have gone toward public transit… Every week we hear a story about something going wrong with Metro. Instead of investing in public transit, O’Malley is taking money out of Maryland’s general fund, which should be funding our schools and our public safety and our environmental stewardship, and instead [he’s] blowing it on this highway… He’s laying off workers. He’s cutting positions. He’s cutting corps programs. And he’s blowing money on an innerstate highway.” The day of the ICC ribbon cutting, the Washington Post noted, “O’Malley (D) wants state employees and teachers to pay more in pension and prescription-drug costs to shore up the state’s underfunded retirement system.”
“This controversy is not going to go away,” said Smith. “The finances on this project are probably going to unravel. Most drivers in this region can’t afford to use this highway. It truly is a highway for the better-off at the expense of those who have less money.” Much of the funding for the ICC will come from toll collections throughout the state, Smith explained. “O’Malley is roughly doubling tolls within the next few years to pay for the ICC. People across the state of Maryland, in Baltimore, on the Eastern Shore, in southern Maryland, any time they use a state toll facility, they’re paying for the ICC.”
The ICC’s environmental impact will be far reaching, according to Smith. “People who live in Washington and who live downstream of here should understand that Martin O’Malley has carved up some of the healthiest watershed in the region… O’Malley has stood at the podium and declared his intent to restore the Anacostia and the Bay and here he is, he’s destroying the headwaters of these streams. You can’t Save the Bay and Pave the Watershed at the same time.”
“[O’Malley] is doing this at the same time that climate change is accelerating. Every week we see a new story about climate change causing worse and worse change and coming faster than everybody thought it was going to. He’s doing this while the Chesapeake Bay hangs by a thread… He’s doing this at a time that unrest is rocketing the Arab world. It’s rocketing the oil producing regions of the world because people there can’t feed themselves while their nations are exporting oil to the United States to feed our addiction because we’ve built too many highways.
“In November 2010, the International Energy Agency reported that world oil production had peaked in 2006… Oil is going to go in steep decline. It’s going to become expensive and we’re blowing our scarce capital digging our own grave by digging highways like the ICC.”
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