Blog: We Marylanders Have It Good

We Marylanders have it good. While we all have a tendency to complain about one issue or another as empowered citizens of the Free State, we should not lose track that despite its being the fifth most densely populated state of the fifty, our state is a pretty swell place to live.

Maryland has a healthier economy than most; our overall level of health and longevity is as good or better than many states. Maryland is a truly beautiful place and determinedly kept so by our leaders and its Highway Administration as America in Miniature.  Our culture is deep rooted with immigrants from across the planet from centuries to decades just past and most of us here are far better off today than those of the generations that immediately preceded ours. The Horse Racing and race tracks stink but I have hopes for the return to a better day for them both!

What we squabble over is mostly about which way or another of how it is we want to make sure our state remains economically viable, healthy and beautiful. It is amazing how so many of us can share the same goal (i.e. a healthy Chesapeake) while being diametrically opposed to one another on how to do it. Inevitably one person believes that the opposite side is all wet, nuts, a bunch of ding-dongs, goofy and should be relocated to another state that is both far away and much less nice than Maryland because it hasn’t any of the regulations that make Maryland the nice place it is.

What has changed most recently to put a sharper edge on the areas of disagreement is the generally weak condition of the nation’s economy. Surely we all could argue about who / what is to blame for this feeble economy but most everyone can agree that it reaches a new bottom every month and that it is having a negative impact on each of our personal lives and well-being. Watching one’s contributed retirement funds dwindle down (again) or your nest egg shrink and seeing the one solid investment you could always count on, your home, retreat in value has to put an edge on your attitude about just about everything.

Whether it is national or local politics, or even our personal relationships, as soon as we make money the focal point, it makes routine disagreement into an ugly brawl. Money hardens the edges; it magnifies the importance; and increases the membership of interested parties. When there isn’t enough of it or the dispersal is perceived as inequitable, money makes us mad.

It makes us mad for more money and that takes us to zoning and planning and how some folks are getting so uptight about PlanMaryland and consequently the Carroll County Master Plan. Land use = money. Were it not for the County Master Plan, the 5 Commissioners wouldn’t care about PlanMaryland save for some political hullabaloo they can raise to grandstand with other disenchanted Republican county commissioners. In their silly hopes for a one year delay in enactment of PlanMaryland they are also hoping to ram through a County Master Plan in the meantime which will evade the Smart Growth infrastructure
requirements that the State plan will put in place.

While PlanMaryland will certainly allow Carroll to proceed to make all of the dumb planning decisions it chooses in placing new growth on green fields, away from existing infrastructure, the Commissioners know that once PlanMaryland is in place it will make the chore of doing so twenty times more difficult to convince the public on; hence their rush to push the local Master Plan full speed ahead while simultaneously attempting to apply the brakes to PlanMaryland. Both plans by the Commissioners are so transparent they seemed doomed at the starting gate.

The sooner the State places its Plan in place the sooner the County will be able to move forward with its Master Plan, using PlanMaryland as its first foundation block.