The federal government has abandoned plans to build an anti-terrorism training center on the Eastern Shore, a project that attracted determined opposition from local residents and conservationists.Already running behind schedule, the $100 million-plus security facility — which was to have included test tracks for evasive driving manuevers, shooting ranges, a bomb explosion pit and a mock urban neighborhood for counter-terrorist drills — faced the prospect of additional delays and an approval process that could have taken years.
"After further analysis," 2,000 acres of farmland in Queen Anne's County "will no longer be considered" for the State Department's diplomatic security facility, the head of the government's real-estate arm wrote in a letter Monday to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, an early supporter of the plan.
General Services Administrator Martha Johnson said preliminary environmental studies "showed that, among other potential concerns, there would be a significant change in land use and considerable noise and traffic impacts."
Those objections, and others, were raised at the outset by critics of the project. It was to have been built in Ruthsburg, a quiet rural crossroads about 30 miles from Annapolis and half an hour from the eastern end of the Bay Bridge.
In the letter, Johnson singled out the "input" of Queen Anne's County citizens during a six-month review process and said she was "confident it led to the proper conclusion."
No new site — or timeline for selecting one — has been announced. Mikulski's office said she still wants it built in Maryland and has spoken with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about considering other locations in the state. Speculation about possible alternate sites includes Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harforn O'Malley.
In a statement, Kratovil expressed disappointment that the decision to pull the plug on the security center meant his district had "lost out on this economic opportunity."
Opponents say the facility should be built on existing federal property in the capital region.
But federal officials settled on a collection of privately owned grain fields across from Tuckahoe State Park as the preferred site. As recently as January, top Washington officials expressed confidence that they would begin acquiring land for the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center within six months.
It soon became clear that those expectations were unrealistic. Members of the Queen Anne's County Commission reversed course in the face of citizen opposition and dropped their support for the campus-like facility.
"Some of us felt a little bamboozled," said Eric Wargotz, a county commissioner and Republican Senate candidate against Mikulski, who was among those who switched sides after having worked to attract the federal facility.
"Jobs are important," he said. "But it was the wrong place for this project."
Mikulski met privately in Ruthsburg Monday with about 15 local critics of the project to inform them personally about the decision. In a prepared statement, she said she had "fought hard for this process to work and for the voices of the residents of Queen Anne's County to be heard."
Late last year, she hailed selection of the site as "good news for three reasons: jobs, jobs and more jobs for Maryland." But after bureaucrats from Washington bungled an initial Queen Anne's public hearing in January, the senator condemned their performance as an "unmitigated disaster."
Kratovil and others also backed away as the controversy threatened to become an election-year issue.
Republican senators, eager to target the issue of budget deficits, recently singled out the Ruthsburg project as an example of politically motivated pork-barrel spending and sought unsuccessfully to remove the funding from the stimulus program.
The announcement that the Shore location had been dropped came 10 days after a federal judge ordered the government to expedite processing of a demand by project opponents for release of internal documents about how the site was chosen.
Among the requested documents are communications between key decision-makers in the executive branch and three Maryland lawmakers, Mikulski, Kratovil and Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two official in the House.
It was not immediately clear whether the decision to pull the plug on the Ruthsburg site would alter the requirement for a quick release of documents about the selection process.
"I think there is a reason that the government has continued to stonewall us on our requests. And I think there is a reason that, even after we filed a lawsuit, there are obviously things they don't want to disclose," said Jay Falstad of the Queen Anne's Conservation Association, which successfully sued the government over the information.
"We have every expectation that those documents will still be produced," he said. "We want to see how Ruthsburg came to be the preferred location."
Federal officials say they searched throughout a 150-mile radius of Washington for a suitable site before settling on Ruthsburg. Officials assured local residents that they would protect the sensitive environment of the Eastern Shore in building the facility.
But in March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — which had been excluded from a formal review of the proposal — warned that it "may adversely affect" the Chesapeake Bay environment, including wetlands and, posssibly, endangered species.
It urged the State Department and GSA to conduct a more thorough study that would have required a lengthier review, increasing the chances that the project might never be built there.
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