Bay Bridge

The public’s final chance to comment on the selection of the corridor for another Bay crossing ends Monday. Residents of Anne Arundel County, the Broadneck Peninsula, and Queen Anne County are the most affected in the 13 county NEPA study area that focuses on the selection of Corridor No. 7.

Anne Arundel and Queen Anne’s Counties is selected as the finalist in this Record of Decision (ROD), then the Queen Anne’s County and central Anne Arundel County in the Route 50/301 location will be the site where the bridge will be built, now or in future decades.

The Tier 1 NEPA study that was done is fundamentally flawed, in that it has not considered any analysis concerning the shore-side construction and quality of life impacts of selecting this corridor versus any other corridor. The study did not indicate whether the proposed bridge would be a replacement bridge, or a parallel and additional bridge. The criteria presented in developing the objectives of the longterm impact of selecting the existing corridor in the Purpose and Need Statement have not been sufficiently developed to execute a FEIS/ROD and exclude all other corridors.

A study of all the costs of the approach road corridors on either side of the potential crossing sites is needed. These important roadways/highways that feed traffic to and from the bridge must be studied and evaluated in any site selection process, but this key requirement was not included in the NEPA DEIS Report. The Purpose and Need statement requires the overall evaluation of the favorable and harmful effects on the region, our State Capitol, the value of having multiple avenues of access across the Bay

The communities in the selection corridor deserve to know and understand what will be the impact on feeder arterials, such as College Parkway, Ritchie Highway and Route 2 South, Route 8, and many other roads? For communities near the current US 50/301 on the Eastern Shore, and those communities near Sandy Point, Cape St. Claire, St. Margaret’s, Arnold, and Annapolis what is an order of magnitude estimate of the Eminent Domain land-takes to accommodate a new bridge?

Stop the Tier 1 NEPA until all critical components have been evaluated.

George McNeal, Annapolis