By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEXINGTON PARK — Take a look around the entire region and the evidence of a do-nothing Republican Administration abounds for the fastest growing region of Maryland; the area’s roadways and bridges groan with traffic and lack of any semblance of mass transit other than buses fuels the appetite of motorists for gasoline.

With almost daily crashes blocking the Governor Thomas Johnson Bridge for hours, with Rt. 301, Rt. 5 and Rt. 4 taking turns being blocked with massive tie-ups, the focus often is on the meltdown on the major roadways.

But a trip down past the bucolic scenes of Ridge on the way to Point Lookout State Park brings back the reality that not only were the major traffic arteries ignored during the last four years while the State of Maryland committed hundreds of millions to a controversial highway in Montgomery County, but even the boondocks have suffered from a lack of state funds.

The late Joe "Judge" Ridgell, made an annual trip to Leonardtown for more than twenty years asking for the county to prioritize the widening of Rt. 5 between Scotland and Point Lookout, to no avail.

For the past eight years, Ridge has had an extra county commissioner, with Dan Raley, who technically is elected from the Lexington Park commissioner district, functioning as the elected commissioner for the southern part of the county by default.

Four years ago a school bus was sideswiped by a dump truck and the bus overturned, loaded with kids. There were minor injuries and a lot of tongue-clucking on the part of elected officials, but the county has always had more important road projects to request the state to fund.

Chancellors Run Road is finally being geared up for a major overhaul after twenty years of being set on the back burner.

The chief reason that project was funded was due to Congressman Steny Hoyer (D. Md. 5th) including funds for the expansion and reconstruction of Rt. 237 (Chancellors Run Road) in the federal budget due to BRAC.

When then-Governor Robert Ehrlich’s administration set up a circus tent for officials to announce the implementation of the funding of the rebuild, they never bothered to give Hoyer any credit.

What did get put into the current budget for Point Lookout was for someone to drive down there and paint wider white lines on the edge of the highway. Perhaps the wide stripe of paint will call more attention to the edge of the highway and somehow keep vehicles from overturning into the deep ditch on each side of the road.

With the Ehrlich Administration ballyhooing their rosy fiscal policies for several years, they somehow managed to leave behind a $1.4 billion deficit.
Now the competition for funding transportation projects all over the state will become more severe.

Fortunately the O’Malley Administration has done more than talk about solving the region’s transportation woes.

Last year, just weeks before the election, Ehrlich suddenly embraced the proposal made by Senator Dyson to build another span over the Patuxent River at Solomon’s.

Ehrlich made a big splash at his election-eve conversion to being a bridge booster but evidently the voters weren’t bamboozled. Ehrlich had vetoed Dyson’s Transportation Study Commission and the General Assembly overturned his veto at the start of last year’s session.

In a final attempt to play politics, Ehrlich only provided $100,000 in funds for the study.

Ehrlich lost the election.

Republican delegate Tony O’Donnell (Lusby) voted for the study before he voted against it by sustaining the Ehrlich veto effort. O’Donnell formerly was for commuter rail before he became against it, now that he is minority leader for the GOP in the House of Delegates.
With the balance of the region’s legislators all being Democrats, only Del. John Wood sides with O’Donnell.

Wood was dumped as a committee chairman when his pal Speaker Cas Taylor lost the election in 2002 and Wood holds little sway in Annapolis while local politicians prepare to run for the district he was first elected to in 1982. While Wood could have been in a position of influence with a new Democrat Governor, Wood sealed his fate by backing Ehrlich in last year’s election.

One of the first commitments made by O’Malley for transportation was to provide $4 million in funding for the Transportation Study.

Anyone who thinks that somehow Wood has any or has had any influence with the state simply needs to look around the northern end of St. Mary’s County. While everyone tries to take credit for the Hughesville bypass, again it was Hoyer who snared Federal funds that made the project come to pass.

"I got $10 million for the Hughesville bypass and Glendening had budgeted $15 million for it during his second term," Hoyer told ST. MARY’S TODAY on Wednesday. "That is $25 million of the $54 million to make it happen, its only the right thing for the last Governor to come up with the balance of the money for what we started."

A project to build a round-about at Chaptico has been beaten around for the past 15 years. It is finally underway and the principal goal is to keep motorists from running stop signs and causing horrible wrecks on Rt. 234.

The Farmers Market twice-a-week traffic jam has been tended to by the SHA by the painting of lines on the roadway, evidently some sort of miracle cure. The only real improvement in the northern end of St. Mary’s has been the chanelized intersection of Rt. 235 and Morganza-Turner Road at Oraville. Again, this change came about due to the lack of ability of motorists to yield to traffic when pulling out from Rt. 6.

Three people lost their lives at this intersection due to a teen driver’s impatience.

The legal number of maneuvers at open intersections numbers at least at 16 but with the concrete curbs, the number is cut down to about 4.

With CSX running coal trains down to Morgantown and Chalk Point each day, the ability of the state to run MARC trains over those tracks is a fairly easy proposition.

The rights of ways are in place, the tracks are in place and the railroad made it clear at a meeting with Delegate John Bohanan (D. California) three years ago that they wanted indemnification from the state for passenger use of his rail line and that the state would have to bear the cost of double-tracking.

Now the railroad is under pressure to stop running hazardous cargo under the mall from Union Station south to Virginia.

The prospect of a terrorist plot to set off an explosion on a train carrying chemicals and explosives has set planners coming up with ways to send freight trains south around Washington to cross over the CSX line that snakes away at White Plains to Indian Head where a new bridge would cross the Potomac River.

Another possibility would be to run a lower bridge platform under a new Rt. 301 span at Morgantown in order to bypass Washington, D.C.

The railroad would greatly benefit from such a plan and the effort to make a safer journey for hazardous material, cargo routinely shipped around the nation every day, would be a boost for finally improving the tracks that come into Southern Maryland.

The track improvements would have to be borne by the railroad and would lessen the cost of adding commuter rail for Maryland.

Reached at the Capital on Wednesday evening, Hoyer told ST. MARY’S TODAY that he was vitally interested in bringing commuter rail to Southern Maryland but he didn’t know if the proposal to redirect freight traffic south through Maryland would work.

"Every local official in the region has called me to say that they are opposed to hazardous cargo going through their areas," said Hoyer. "I have asked that perhaps a far less expensive option would be to simply have the trains checked before they ran underground at the Mall. It would be a lot cheaper."

Hoyer brought several million to the State of Maryland for a light rail study for the Rt. 210 corridor ten years ago.

But with the support of O’Malley and his Secretary of Transportation John Porcari, commuter rail for this region might finally become a reality.

A big cost item would be the construction of overpasses for the CSX line.

The State of Maryland clearly had not a single planner employed when it built the Mattawoman-Beantown Road Rt. 5 bypass without constructing an overpass.

Senator Mac Middleton told ST. MARY’S TODAY that building a Potomac River rail bridge would bring 30 freight trains a day through Waldorf. He may be on the low end of that guess.

The price of gas may become a lot higher in order to fund transportation improvements.

One of the quickest fixes that the General Assembly can come up with to replenish the transportation fund which was emptied out by the Ehrlich Administration for years to come would be to increase the gas tax.

That isn’t a fun idea for anyone but the money has to come from somewhere and higher gas prices are fueling plenty of interest in commuter rail.

Planned commuter bus parking lots finally got the attention of the Tri-County Council.

The new chairman of the Tri-County Council is St. Mary’s Commissioner Larry Jarboe (R. Golden Beach), who is one of the most ardent supporters of commuter rail for the region.

Jarboe said this week that he has spoken to each member of the three county panel and lobbied them to support making Hughesville a major rail station with parking lots for commuters which would serve both buses and trains.

Jarboe has given his support to Sen. Roy Dyson, the area’s chief public transportation advocate, and to Hoyer and Bohanan, even earning the ire of some of his fellow Republicans, including one who was pummeled in last year’s election by Dyson.
"With Hughesville now a ghost town, it could be just the ticket to revitalize the town to once again make it revolve around train travel," said Jarboe, "just like it was a hundred years ago. With parking, restaurants and trains coming and going, shops might once again open their doors."

With the support of the county commissioners in each county, the legislators and the Governor, all the tools for solutions are on the table.

"Wayne Clark, our TCC Executive Director was amazed at the extent of the Governor’s support of the funding for our transportation study commission," said Jarboe. "We were expecting far less and now it shows the extent of the commitment of the Governor to this region."