American Dream

Citizens complain Parole plan is kept under wraps

By Phillip McGowan
Sun Staff

August 17, 2005

Quotes:

Over and over, Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens has heard the accusations that her administration is hiding information about the redevelopment of Parole Plaza.

The morning after 50 community activists and other citizens challenged the Anne Arundel County Council to address more of Owens' "stonewalling" regarding the $400 million project, the county executive shot back yesterday that she has had enough.

"I don't have a lot of patience for this anymore," she said.

Skeptics of one of the largest redevelopment projects in county history feel the same way about Owens' planners, accusing them Monday night of concealing pertinent details of the 35-acre project from the public.

"Attempts by citizens to get information on Parole have been next to impossible," Scott Mobley, president of the Annapolis Neck Peninsula Federation, told the council. "The administration has shrouded Parole in a cloak of secrecy."

While supporting efforts to develop the vacant site near U.S. 50, community leaders criticized the speed of the approval process for the proposed Annapolis Towne Centre at Parole, and
the perceived lack of oversight by Owens and her planning director, Joseph W. Rutter Jr., as the project has nearly doubled in size - to 2.1 million square feet of residential, retail and office space - from what was first approved 11 years ago.

The growing scale has renewed residents' worries about traffic and environmental concerns, but they said their paramount concern is a perceived unwillingness of the Owens administration to reveal unfavorable details that could derail the project.

County Councilwoman Barbara D. Samorajczyk, a Democrat who represents the Parole area, has sought answers about the amount of open space to be included, traffic congestion and design changes to the project - including a recently added retaining wall that buffers it from Route 2.

But she said she has come up empty.

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Commentatry: For those that don't know Annapolis, Maryland's geography - there was, for many years (dating back to at least the early 1960's), a huge (and rather ugly, in my opinion) open-air shipping plaza here known as Parole Plaza.

It is several miles west of the State House (Maryland's state capitol building) and the quaint, colonial part of Annapolis, and is not even within the corporate limits of Annapolis itself.

The businesses in Parole Plaza moved away in the early 1990's, and the whole thing was torn down in the late 1990's. It is surrounded by arterial roads (which carry heavy traffic - and have long carried heavy traffic), and by other businesses. U.S. 50/U.S. 301, the John Hanson Highway, a freeway, runs a short distance north of this parcel, and there is ample access.

This is a highly appropriate place for new development of some sort - and intense new development, too. I wonder if these citizens are planning on compensating the landowner if the project is scaled-down?