Purple Line and Corridor Cities Transitway are basically a go now! Transportation tax passes House! (Baltimore: tax rates, live)

[MDAllstar]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

Let US become WV? I am not involving you at all, you still don't see this difference. We have no desire or need for your home to adopt what I propose for my region. Again, different regions, different realities, different solutions.

Besides, I have stated that I am willing to compromise with enviro regs so long as tax credits to keep the industries competitive come with them. This kind of compromise benefits us (we get the jobs), you (coal keeps your power on,) and the environment (we do much better than WV in this area.)

Lol...West Virginia doesn't want Cumberland. In fact, what state has grown their borders in our lifetime? Are you living in reality?

[molukai]

Gentlemen, I propose a solution to what seems to be a fundamental difference in regional culture: Have Western Maryland annexed to West Virginia. Problem solved.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by MDAllstar

Septic restrictions: A war on pollution, not rural Maryland - baltimoresun.com

Um...that is an Op-Ed, you know, an opinion. We both have opinions too. I am not surprised the big city papers don't accept our side of the debate.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by MDAllstar

Lol...West Virginia doesn't want Cumberland. In fact, what state has grown their borders in our lifetime? Are you living in reality?

You missed the joke. US was capatalized because their is no "us" as I see it. I don't wish to bind you to anything, as you were insinuating when you said.

Yes, let's become West Virginia.....

You will get tired of me saying this, regional solutions for regional problems. You pick your path, let us pick ours.

[btsilver]

Originally Posted by MDAllstar

You seem to have missed my entire point. There would be no Eastern Shore as you know it without the urban areas. Who do you think paid for it to be built when it was all woods? The urban areas are just getting back some of their investment and they will never get back 100% of what has been put out. This is amazing that people can be this clueless. How do you think the western part of our nation was populated? Who do you think financed it? The east coast! The same thing applies to the rural areas in Maryland. What they should have done is blocked tax dollars from going to them to even cut down forests down where they all live to build their towns.

This post failed.

[btsilver]

Just for the record, I live in Montgomery Village and none of this is going to benefit me at all.

[ay jayy]

Originally Posted by westsideboy

#1 Our major source of wealth at current is the fossil fuel extraction. I would like the Governor to stop attempting to kill the coal mining tax credit every year. The tax credit covers the cost of the enviro regs the state requires for mining in Maryland; upfront bonding for reclamation, returning the land to its original zoned use, mitigating runoff, etc. I think the combination of good enviro regs and a modest tax credit to keep the industry competitive with states that have little to no regs is a good compromise, for us, you, and the environment. Keep the door open for gas drilling. Again, I don't mind studies being done or regs being put in place, but the moratorium shouldn't be used as a defacto ban.

#2 Ease the septic requirements for sub-divisions in counties with decreasing population. Right now, the state's admin agencies are acting as a defacto zoning board, refusing to allow the counties, where zoning legally lies (or always has in the past) to approve plans proposed in their home counties. The Eastern part of our county is already mostly owned by the state (Green Ridge State Forest.) This part of our county is in easier commuting distance to Hagerstown and Winchester. Growth should be allowed here as the market dictates (it isn't right now, but that may change.) Their are plenty of trees and nature here to allow for modest residential growth in the future.

#3. Reduce regulatory red tape and cut taxes so our part of Maryland is competitive with WV and PA in competing for residents and business. As it stands, WV and PA put up less red tape and can offer better deals than we can. The result is they get what modest growth does occur in our region.

#4. Mass transit should be paid by those that use mass transit. The gas tax should be used to pay for things gas users need, like roads. Again, I am willing to find a middle ground to fund needed infrastructure, but it shouldn't be in the form of a regressive tax that hurts the rural poor the most (also the group least likely to ever benefit for the transit lines) and it shouldn't be perpetual. Eventually mass transit needs to be self-funding. If it can't achieve this, it is by defintion, a market failure. At that point it is up to the counties where it was built to decide whether it worth taking their residents' tax money to prop up something that can't support itself.

#4. For people that don't live here to stop telling us what we should do and what we should be. This one doesn't involve government, per say, but involves the attitudes of many people in Annapolis, in Maryland, and on this discussion board. I have never, nor ever heard anyone from my home, spout out opinions about what downstate Maryland should do, how they should grow (or not), where they should live. Yet, downstate people have no problem dictating terms to us. It comes across as patronizing and creates the impression that we citizens of Western Maryland aren't full partners in state government, but something more like a colony or territory under the control of others.

Feel free to ask anything else you would like to know.

I think these are mostly reasonable. I think my main problem is with your point #4.

I dont think transit should be required to make a profit, or be neutral. If it were, it would be too expensive for those who need to use it. Besides, that is not the point of infrastructure. Roads and highways are not revenue neutral either.

Mass Transit also creates a lot of positive externalities, even for those that don't use it.

[Zimar]

You know, I have to say, as far as business-friendly policies go, there are two sides to every coin. Imagine how enthusiastic my parents were back home in WV when a gas company was going to put a well and a dumping pond about 70 feet from their 500k house. In that circumstance we all wished that WV had a few more protections for its citizens and was a little less business friendly. And WV has always been like that, bending over backwards for the coal companies and now the gas companies. In the short term, they profit from a boom and snatch a few opportunities from places like Maryland. In the long term, the company gets what it wants, leaves, and WV is still for the most part a sh!thole that still can't compete in a modern economy. Excuse me for thinking that perhaps it's not a tragedy that no one is making a big effort to help rural MD follow that same trajectory.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by Zimar

You know, I have to say, as far as business-friendly policies go, there are two sides to every coin. Imagine how enthusiastic my parents were back home in WV when a gas company was going to put a well and a dumping pond about 70 feet from their 500k house. In that circumstance we all wished that WV had a few more protections for its citizens and was a little less business friendly. And WV has always been like that, bending over backwards for the coal companies and now the gas companies. In the short term, they profit from a boom and snatch a few opportunities from places like Maryland. In the long term, the company gets what it wants, leaves, and WV is still for the most part a sh!thole that still can't compete in a modern economy. Excuse me for thinking that perhaps it's not a tragedy that no one is making a big effort to help rural MD follow that same trajectory.

I am not a fan of mountain top removal, I don't want to see that come to Maryland. Still, we burn coal for power because it is what we have, and it is cheap. We aren't going to stop burning coal anytime soon, although the drop in natural gas costs are cutting down on coal extraction. Luckily, for Western Maryland, we have both and are positioned in either case to help out ourselves a bit.

I hear what you are saying. I didn't know streams weren't supposed to run orange and smell like sulfer until I was out of elementary school. I didn't answer MDAllstar's question, but yes those of us that live in Appalachia are accuately aware of the environmental damage coal mining causes, it isn't just an abstraction to us.

Still, there is other side of the coin. That drainage tunnel that causes the stream near the old homestead to run orange was also the reason the mine my great-great grandfathers worked in had another 30 years of life in it. Take away that mine and my ancestors don't have the chance to live in Allegany County and my 200+ year connection with my home county never exists.

So it is give and take. Benefits and drawbacks. Nobody, the residents of my home especially, want to see what we have destroyed, but we also need to be able to use what we have to make a living for ourselves and our decendants. In this respect, we are no different from anywhere else.

The outrage coming from rural Maryland is because the balance has swung too far away from us and quite frankly, the attitude we receive when we point this out on a state level is largely ignorance on the issues and personal condesention towards us for having the audacity to point out that the realities of the places we live aren't matched by state policy and attitude. MDAllstar is Exhibit #A on this point.

[westsideboy]

Originally Posted by molukai

Gentlemen, I propose a solution to what seems to be a fundamental difference in regional culture: Have Western Maryland annexed to West Virginia. Problem solved.

Are we better off NOT being "One Maryland"?

Tongue in cheek mostly, since counties don't have any sovereignty, but an interesting idea. It isn't just us talking about this either.

The new state

Perhaps it’s time to resurrect an idea from the past. From the 1940s until he died in 1968, J. William Hunt wrote a weekly column for the Cumberland Sunday Times entitled “Across the Desk.” On Sunday, Feb. 3, 1946 (Page 6), he proposed the creation of a new state to be named “Augusta.”

As he proposed it, the new state would be comprised of the three counties of Western Maryland, 14 from northeast West Virginia, two from northern Virginia, and seven from southwestern Pennsylvania. The capital would be at McHenry in Garrett County.

He re-visited this proposal in his columns in 1952, 1962, and 1964. The last article included a map.

In his 1946 proposal, he supplied the rationale for choosing the name Augusta: “... the name was supplied by George Washington in the dark days of the War for Independence. If the forces of oppression, then represented by Great Britain, should succeed in defeating the American patriots, Washington declared that he would retire to the mountains of ‘West Augusta’ and there surrounded by the hardy pioneers and crack riflemen of Western Maryland, Western Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania he and his forces could never be defeated and never would surrender.”