VIENNA -- IT'S A grand view from Mayor Russ Brinsfield's home on Water Street in this old Dorchester County farming and fishing village.
The breeze-ruffled Nanticoke River gleams in the spring sun, and looking east across the tidal river to the Wicomico County shore, marsh and forest stretch for miles upstream and down.
It's a good place to live, agree the people Brinsfield has asked here to discuss the future of Vienna. It's a 15-minute drive from jobs in Salisbury and Cambridge, 45 minutes from the beach, an hour and a half from Annapolis.
It's a prime jumping-off spot to some of the state's best hunting, fishing and bird-watching, and 15 minutes from Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
Helped by state and federal grants, the town of 300 has spent $3.5 million to upgrade and rebuild water and sewage treatment, streets, storm drains and sidewalks.
Vienna Elementary is a Maryland Blue Ribbon school, lauded for academic excellence. The town has cleaned up its waterfront and is creating a riverside park there.
It's a good place to live.
So the mayor has been wondering: How do you get people to live here?
Clare Hughes, a longtime local Realtor, says the multiple listings show two homes selling in Vienna in the past two years. About 10 are for sale, and several building lots are vacant.
Vienna's "played by the rules, done what the experts say you need to do improved our infrastructure, set design standards, cleared away dilapidated buildings," Brinsfield says.
"We feel like we've come to a threshold," says local businessman Bill Larmore. "What is it we need to do to go to the next level?"
Hughes says Vienna's doing good things.
An annual shad festival to commemorate the town's fishing heritage draws nearly 1,000 people each April. The Chicone Ruritan Club sells "planked" shad, cooked by a delicious slow-roasting technique using an open fire.
A Christmas festival of lights, with caroling in the streets, home tours and hayrides for youngsters, is becoming a tradition.
But people looking to buy mostly want new homes built on large lots carved out of farmland and forests, Hughes says. Brinsfield wonders what it will take for existing towns to compete with sprawling new development.
This is at the heart of Maryland's Smart Growth policy -- channeling growth away from open spaces, to areas where public investment in roads and sewage and schools exists.
