Thirty years ago, Calvert County had 20,000 residents. Today, it has nearly five times as many. Traffic has tripled on Route 4, the county's spine. Residents are not only driving to Washington. Many go south to the Patuxent Naval Air Station, which now employs more than 17,000 people.
The problem isn't just that the county grew, but how it grew. In the 1980s, Calvert zoning rules limited builders to one house per 5 acres in rural areas. Contractors rushed to carve up farms and forests into developments that - because of the big lots - destroyed huge swaths of open space.
"The way they were building, they were consuming a tremendous amount of land," said Karen Edgecombe of the Chestnut Trails Land Trust, a local land conservation group.
Along the water, new residents sheared away trees to build mansions, piers and decks - violating the spirit, if not the letter, of Maryland's 1984 Critical Area Law. The law does not prohibit building along the shoreline, but it does limit how close to the water and how much of a footprint a house can have.
Calvert County now has dozens of shopping centers, too, filled with Chinese restaurants and Curves gyms. They have risen from the forests where Fowler and his friends used to hunt for quail, and the river is the poorer for it.
The forest acted as a sponge to absorb nitrogen. The newly paved surfaces are more like a chute, carrying what runs off the land into waterways. Rain picks up fertilizer from lawns, as well as nitrogen from exhaust pipes and deposits it into the Patuxent and, later, the bay.
During the past couple of years, Calvert County officials decided they needed to slow the onslaught. They have changed rural zoning to one house per 20 acres - a standard so stringent officials say they hope it will channel development to town centers, as Smart Growth principles suggest.
Calvert is the only Maryland county to announce that it will cap growth, allowing no more than 37,000 homes to be built. With just fewer than 31,000 now, planning director Gregory Bowen expects to approach the cap by 2030.
Bowen cautions that the policies will lead to change only over time. New laws "don't affect the development you see today. They affect the development you see some time from now," he said.
Patuxent activist Jennifer Bevan-Dangel said the early sprawl persuaded Calvert residents that they needed growth controls. Though developers dislike the cap, she applauds it.
