Protecting Marylands Land

Protecting Maryland’s Land (washingtonpost.com)

“OUR BEAUTIFUL parks and public forests never were and never will be for sale,” declared Maryland’s Republican governor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., in a damage-control statement last week. Really? At the governor’s direction, Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources compiled a list of what it calls surplus land — that is, parcels available for Mr. Ehrlich’s stated goal of selling off “questionable state property.” The list includes 3,000 acres in and around state parks from one end of Maryland to the other. And let’s not forget his administration’s most recent land gambit — the proposed sweetheart sale of 836 acres of environmentally sensitive, state-owned forest land in St. Mary’s County to a politically connected Baltimore developer who stood to make as much as $7 million in tax breaks on the deal.