Bel Air area Del. Susan McComas says the first inkling she got that the State Highway Administration had reversed its position on Route 924 access for the controversial proposed Bel Air South Walmart came during an annual reception held for legislators and local officials hosted in Annapolis on Jan. 22 by members of Harford County's business community.
"It was like somebody shot my dog; it was that horrible," she said in a telephone interview Thursday morning.
The news, relayed via a letter from an SHA official to Harford County Executive Barry Glassman on Jan. 21, has sent Harford legislators scrambling to reverse the decision and resulted in quite a lot of finger-pointing, although McComas, who has opposed the Walmart project since its conception four years ago, says it may never be clear from where the pressure came on the SHA, if there was, in fact, any pressure.
McComas and State Sen. Bob Cassilly, who also represents the Bel Air South area, were on a conference call late Thursday afternoon with Steve Forster, chief of the SHA's access management division, who wrote the letter to Glassman informing him the agency had decided to permit right in and right out access to the 33-acre Walmart site from Route 924.
They said afterward that the SHA appears to be willing to follow Harford's County wishes on the access issue and that the matter remains fluid.
"I was concerned that here we are in January with the election of a new county executive and governor and suddenly everything is changed, which I think would cause a lot of people to lose faith in the process," Cassilly said.
After talking with Foster, however, both he and McComas said the process that led to the SHA changing its position began several months ago and that the timing of last week's SHA letter to the county, while unwelcome, appeared to be more coincidental than anything else or, in Cassilly's words, "sloppy on the public information side of things."
Cassilly said Foster has agreed to send them a chronology of meetings and copies of correspondence that led to the SHA decision.
"This is step one, to get feedback and then go from there," he explained.
McComas said she also broached the possibility of setting up some kind of public information meeting involving the SHA, county, Walmart and the community.
Both legislators pointed out that the county previously informed Walmart it will be responsible for millions of dollars of improvements to Plumtree Road, Blue Spruce Drive and Bel Air South Parkway in accordance with the county's Adequate Public Facilities Law. All this would have to be done, regardless of how the Route 924 access issue is resolved.
McComas said there was no indication that any change was forthcoming on the Walmart access issue. But she also admitted there had been a sort of deafening silence about the project that seemed to have faded from the background during last year, not coincidentally, an election year.
McComas also said she has never understood why Walmart has insisted on abandoning an existing store at Constant Friendship, less than two miles away, to build on the site at Route 924 and Plumtree Road. "It's the wrong place for it; there's already a traffic snarl," she said.
"We're still doing what we can do to be fair to everyone, but it's very frustrating," she added.
At the county level, Glassman has denied anyone in his administration was involved, a claim McComas and Cassilly said they believe.
It was Glassman's planning director, Bradley Killian, who told her about the SHA letter at the Harford County Night event, McComas said. The county executive and his staff learned about it from a phone call while on the bus to Annapolis, she said.
Glassman said Tuesday his administration remains "consistent" with the stand county officials took in 2012 that the access should not be granted.
A letter from Killian was sent to the SHA on Dec. 16, barely two weeks after Glassman took office, which reiterated that position, as outlined in a prior County Council resolution requesting that the SHA deny access from Route 924. "There has been not action taken by Harford County to modify its position denying access to MD 924 for this development," the letter states.
The county has not yet granted the Walmart project any necessary approvals, Glassman said.
The state's reversal on access also blindsided County Councilman Jim McMahan, whose district includes many of the neighborhoods closest to the Walmart site.
McMahan, who learned about the shift Monday, sent a follow-up letter to Glassman on Wednesday urging the county executive to support stronger regulations controlling development of so-called "big box" retail stores. Copies of the letter were sent to other county and state officials and Bel Air South community leaders.
"Whereas a developer has the ability to apparently work behind the scenes with SHA to subvert the will of the Harford County Council and the Harford County Planning Department, it is now more apparent than ever that the county needs to adopt amendments to its 'development regulations' that gives the county complete control over any 'big box' site plan design, including access," he wrote.
McMahan also warned that the biggest impact from a Route 924 access, assuming the 186,000-square-foot Walmart is built, would be to the Bright Oaks community across the highway.
"These residents find it almost impossible, especially during morning and evening rush hour, to exit their community," he wrote. "There is no signalization at that intersection [Route 924 and Bright Oaks Drive] and, from what I understand, there will not be any, even if 'right in' and 'right out' is allowed."
Cassilly noted that he and many other candidates for office did plenty of sign waving at the intersection of Route 924 and Bel Air South Parkway last summer and became intimately familiar with the traffic problems in the area.
He said he doesn't want to see things being approved "that rip apart the community; that's insane."
"After we know what the process is about, we can deal with the best interests of the community," he said.