Once a year officials of different towns around the county come serially before Kent’s Commissioners, and everyone trades careful pleasantries, shares friendly advice, swaps a few suggestions and all the while is doing serious wheedling.
Chestertown’s turn came Tuesday night. Mayor Margo Bailey told them how “a living shoreline” is going to be built along Wilmer Park next to the pavilion, an area clogged with rocks and glass and trash and phragmites, where sea grasses will be planted so little fish can hatch.
She told of plans for “a natural flushing area” where Horsey Lane passes over a creek now choked by phragmities and silt, where there could be a pocket park with crushed oyster walkways and native trees, perhaps planted by people in memory of loved ones, where water could drain away, as it used to.
She touted Chestertown’s “buy local” campaign to get the folks of Kent and Queen Anne’s Counties to do their shopping where their money will stay, and create jobs, and buy local produce, and not send their money online to a giant company in cyberspace.
It was as if the county commissioners had been on Mars, or maybe over Dover which is much the same, and hadn’t been reading the Kent County News for the past year. What was this all about?
As the mayor explained, afterward, “Last year some people wanted us to annex that land above the pawnshop for housing and mixed use. The council felt we have room in town for about another 750 dwellings of different types, and we have enough water and sewer for that, and we don’t have enough water and sewer to annex anything.”
Bailey adds, “My point is for the commissioners to toe the line at zoning outside town limits. To not be persuaded to allow heavy residential development outside Chestertown limits that would sorely impact us. They have done so, and we want to encourage them to keep doing it.
“We want them to know we need to take care of what we have before we think about branching out, before we do any more.”
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