County Commissioners

As the state Board of Public Works approved $264 million for school construction Wednesday, two counties asked to delay new buildings because they aren't certain they can come up with the money to finish or operate them — an unprecedented sign, officials said, of the continuing financial challenges confronting local governments. "We've never dealt with anything like this before, where we've come to this sort of crisis point," David G. Lever, director of the state's Public School Construction Program, said of the requests by Charles and Wicomico counties.

The recent decision by Frederick County's Board of County Commissioners to eliminate funding to its local Head Start program was surpassed in callousness only by the statements two male commissioners subsequently chose to make on child-rearing. After voting to cut the county's $2.3 million contribution to the Head Start program, which readies preschool children from low-income families for kindergarten, commissioners C. Paul Smith and Kirby Delauter remarked that the ideal households were those in which the women stayed at home with small children, as their wives did. They said this made not only for better child-rearing but also for better marriages.

Carroll County commissioners are scheduled to be updated this morning on a plan to join with Frederick County in building a waste-to-steam facility that eventually could save both counties millions of dollars but which has drawn opposition because of environmental concerns and large upfront costs. Carroll Public Works Director J. Michael Evans will present the commissioners with a status report on a proposed facility to be constructed in Frederick County that could offset county's needs for dumping trash in landfills or transferring waste to neighboring states.

Granville Daniel Trimper, who was a hands-on owner of Ocean City's famed seaside amusement park and was active in local politics, died Monday at Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin. He was 79. Family members said no cause of death had been determined but that Mr. Trimper had been treated for an infection after knee-replacement surgery this summer. "After a lifetime spent running all manner of careening, tilting, whirling or spinning mechanical thrill rides, the 70-year-old patriarch never seems to tire of the nightly spectacle," said a 1999 Sun profile.

Leave land choices to local officials The editorial "The case against sprawl" (Sept. 30) alludes to a need for increased state involvement in local land-use decision-making and suggests that counties will object to the loss of power that this change implies. But the issue here is not about a loss of power but about sensible policy. It is county elected officials who are most accessible to citizens and most knowledgeable about land conditions in their communities. Vesting increased land-use authority in unelected state officials in distant offices denies citizens the accountability they deserve and demand.

The Carroll County commissioners agreed yesterday to support a set of countywide recommendations as part of a continuing effort to conserve water. "We really do view this as a countywide problem, and the solution needs to be countywide, too," said Marge Wolf, Westminster's city administrator and a member of the committee that developed the conservation measures. The proposals include: adopting a countywide approach in imposing voluntary restrictions, instead of separate county and municipal policies and practices; offering a rebate, credit and incentive program to encourage conservation; creating landscaping plans that factor in the potential for recurring drought; and having utilities review their water-rate structure annually to reward less use and penalize excessive use. "The current rate structures really do not encourage either conservation or judicious use of the water," Wolf said.

Nancy C. Tilton, Baltimore County's jury commissioner, died of a heart attack Tuesday at her Fullerton home. She was 60. Born Nancy Chancellor in Baltimore and raised in Fullerton, she was a 1965 graduate of Perry Hall School and earned a diploma at Strayer Business College. As a young woman, she worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and Whiting Turner Construction Co. In 1977, she joined the Jury Office in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County in Towson and in 1986 she was named its jury commissioner.

Carroll County residents loudly told their legislative delegation yesterday that they do not want to rush the creation of a county police department and they want the matter to go to referendum. Many criticized the county commissioners' decision in October to create a county police force and to give themselves the power to appoint its chief. "The commissioners are really wrong on this point, and I ask that they change their minds," said Harold Forney, a county resident who was among about 200 people gathered for a 2 1/2 -hour hearing on the topic.

A day after proposing one of the most austere state budgets in the past two decades, Gov. Martin O'Malley stopped at a Baltimore County high school yesterday to highlight a brighter point in his spending plan - $333 million for school renovation and construction projects in the coming year. It is the second-highest amount of money proposed for such work, county and state officials said. The appropriation for this school year - $400 million - was the highest, they said. "There's nothing that speaks to the expectations that we have of our children quite so much as the condition of the buildings in which learning and teaching take place," O'Malley said after touring Western School of Technology and Environmental Science in Catonsville.

The Carroll County Department of Recreation and Parks will hold a public meeting to discuss the Middlebrooke Trail project at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Westminster Senior and Community Center, 125 Stoner Ave. The Middlebrooke Trail is planned to start at the Old Robert Moton School and Health Department Complex, run behind the Middlebrooke neighborhood, join Center Street near the Farm Museum entrance and continue to Landon C. Burns Park for a length of...