Icc

ONE ASPECT OF THE debate over the billion-dollar Intercounty Connector bugs me. It's the claim that, without the ICC, Maryland is doomed to become an economic backwater. The pro-highway crowd, those conservative suits who are always bellyaching that Maryland has an anti-business climate, say we need the ICC to connect companies in the job-rich, high-tech I-270 corridor in Rockville to I-95, the port of Baltimore and Baltimore-Washington International Airport.This is where I pull over to ask a few questions.

There wasn't much public in the public hearing held by the Maryland Transportation Authority last week in Beltsville on its proposed tolls on the just-around-the-corner Intercounty Connector. A couple of dozen folks who might actually be described as public - not media, not state officials or contractors - took seats in the sparsely occupied cafeteria at High Point High School. But only a handful actually approached the microphone to share their views with the members of the authority's board.

The toothpaste is out of the tube. The fat lady has not only sung; she's cooling down with a post-operatic beer. The Rubicon has been crossed - by a six-lane toll bridge. Pick your cliche, but the War of the Intercounty Connector is over. The road builders won. The greens lost. When U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. issued his ruling Nov. 8 rejecting legal challenges to the federal approval of the long-fought-over toll road through the Washington suburbs, that was the ballgame.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court gave the federal government yesterday a major new mechanism for helping merged railroads cut their costs: the power to set aside workers' job-protection clauses in existing labor contracts.Ruling in cases involving two rail mergers -- one of them the linking of the Chessie System and the Seaboard Coast Line into CSX Transportation Inc. -- the court declared that the Interstate Commerce Commission may override railway union contracts if that is necessary to assure that an ICC-approved merger will succeed.

In 2005, foes of the Intercounty Connector raised a little hell about the Ehrlich administration's plans to build the long-delayed highway as a toll road - estimating that a daily end-to-end commuter might face up to $1,500 a year in tolls. "If you're earning $40,000 a year and taking home $30,000 a year, that's 5 percent of your take-home pay," Montgomery County Councilman Phil Andrews said at the time. The public yawned. Proponents accused opponents of using scare tactics. The $2.6 billion project went ahead.

Q: Despite the state's budget crunch, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. is moving ahead with plans to build the Intercounty Connector in Montgomery County. Would you prefer to see Maryland invest in this and other highway projects, or in public transit initiatives such as the Baltimore regional rail plan and the maglev line? The Intercounty Connector is a bankrupt idea from yesteryear. According to every official study done, it will not solve, or even significantly lessen, the problems of congestion on the Washington Beltway, Interstate 95, Interstate 270 or Route 29. Using all the usual traffic performance measures, the modeled roadway performed no better, and in some cases worse, than the alternatives.

Here in the Baltimore metropolitan area, we're a bit disconnected from that whole Intercounty Connector thing going on between Montgomery and Prince George's counties. For a lot of us who keep mainly to the Baltimore Beltway and the roads that intersect it, the ICC might as well be a bridge in Alaska. It's "down there" somewhere, designed to connect Interstate 95 near Laurel with Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg. But Baltimoreans and Marylanders everywhere should pay attention. A lot of our money - and our quality of life - is at stake.

For many decades, the Maryland environmental movement has hated the Inter-county Connector with a blinding passion. It was environmentalists' worst nightmare, and the symbol of all that was short-sighted, backward and crassly commercial. They fought the highway proposal in the county councils, at the polls and in the General Assembly and the courts. They almost had it killed in the 1990s, but like a movie zombie it wouldn't stay dead. The opponents finally lost on all counts, and the 18-mile toll road in suburban Washington is now well on its way to completion.

Opponents of the Intercounty Connector have appealed a federal judge's decision to allow construction of the highway. Environmental Defense, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Naturalist Society filed an appeal Monday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. They are seeking to overturn a November ruling by U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr., who rejected arguments that federal and state planners did not properly study the impact the 18-mile highway would have on the environment and the health of residents living nearby.

PARRIS N. Glendening may have outsmarted himself. His decision to kill a long-debated highway designed to ease suburban Washington area traffic has kicked up a storm in an area absolutely critical to Mr. Glendening's re-election chances in November.For 15 years, Mr. Glendening has backed the Intercounty Connector proposal that is supposed to link Gaithersburg, Rockville and northern Montgomery County to Prince George's and the southern tier of the Baltimore region. Suddenly, without any warning to local officials, he pulled the plug.