ICC Endorsements

Candidate Endorsements and the ICC

Pamela Lindstrom—The Sierra Club’s Montgomery County activists may seem to be obsessed with the Intercounty Connector. Thus, we should explain why we single out officials’ votes on the ICC among the many votes taken on important environmental issues.

The ICC will set transportation policy in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties for years to come. A road this expensive will affect transportation policy all over the State. To quote Robert Smith, Governor Ehrlich’s former appointee to the Metro Board, “All money available is going to the Intercounty Connector and, indeed, even future federal money has been bonded for that project.” This expenditure might not be so ridiculous if the ICC would actually help relieve congestion, but the state’s own studies show that it won’t. And, it is to be a toll road with exceptionally high tolls that will make it unaffordable to those of us struggling to make ends meet. To learn more about the ICC deficiencies please visit www.savecommunities.org.

The ICC will be extraordinarily damaging to our best streams and forests. But the ICC’s problems go way beyond ineffectiveness and environmental impact. This one road will be our transportation policy. Transportation policy determines land use and growth policy in positive and negative ways. Building a road of such length and capacity will increase driving on many of the roads it intersects. Providing space for moving and parked cars consumes land, forcing buildings farther apart, making public transit uneconomical, and walking unpleasant if not dangerous. Thus the ICC will continue the historic role of roads that fuel ever-expanding sprawl development.

Sustainable transportation policy requires provision for alternate modes. We must provide more public transit, from major rail lines, like the Purple Line and the Red Line in Baltimore, to lots of new buses for efficient local service. We must remodel arterial roads like Rockville Pike into boulevards friendly to buses, bikes, and pedestrians alike. These facilities, though expensive, would cost far less than the ICC, but they would be unaffordable given the ICC’s demands. Without these new facilities, the public will rightly fear increased congestion, and oppose the transit-oriented infill development that can transform our auto-oriented suburbs into communities where we can travel without cars and driving.

We are just beginning to realize how different the 21st century will be from the 20th. Our profligate use of energy will end, whether due to our foresight, or due to decreasing supply, increasing prices, and disruptions caused by irrational world leaders. We find it difficult to excuse even legislators with good environmental records when they do not or will not understand the costs of setting us on the wrong path.

The Sierra Club’s endorsement policy is to endorse incumbents with good records on our issues. Obviously, there are many issues other than the ICC that come before the legislature. We have a number of legislators with excellent voting records, except for the one vote on the ICC funding. In a rather unsatisfying compromise, we decided not to endorse those incumbents who have publicly led the fight for the ICC, and to give the others a qualified endorsement in order to highlight their support for the ICC’s disastrous funding mechanism. Our list of endorsed candidates highlights with asterisks those incumbents who supported the ICC funding.

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