![]() In an unconventional twist on a traditional method, anti-highway campaigners attended a public hearing at a Greenbelt, MD, high school in June 1997, but instead of following the usual format of individually speaking at a microphone, the group performed a musical skit at the hearing, titled “Development Sucks.” According to the ensemble’s four-page script, the first act consisted of cast members dramatizing the history of suburbanization and urban decline in the Washington region since World War II, utilizing props that included a shopping cart, vacuum cleaner, and cardboard facades of Washington landmarks and suburbs. Public resistance to the project largely consisted of individuals choosing to express their opposition through traditional systems of communication established by the government and the media: residents wrote letters to newspapers, testified at public hearings, called their legislators, signed petitions, etc. The declining political support, coupled with the difficulties state highway administrators faced during the 1980’s in writing an environmental impact statement satisfactory to federal regulators, caused the first ICC study to be formally abandoned in 1989. In Montgomery County, where elections frequently revolved around candidates’ development platforms, the county’s entire delegation of state legislators (the state’s largest bloc) declared its opposition to the ICC project in 1980. As neighbors spoke with one another about the potential impact on their communities and the highway developed into a popular topic of everyday conversation, the issue became highly politicized (what the Washington Post named the single most divisive political issue in the state) and public opposition grew. The region’s residents have a history of being highly preoccupied with issues of town planning and development policy, with the local general public taking a great interest in what is elsewhere dismissed as the most mundane aspect of governance. The opposition to the ICC historically has not been coordinated through a single entity or campaign leader, but rather has been taken as the collective protests of many small, autonomous organizations such as homeowners’ associations and civic associations, as well as numerous private citizens individually and independently voicing their disapproval to their politicians. Widely considered to be one of the most controversial Maryland road projects in living memory, opposition to the highway stalled the project for decades, with construction getting underway sixty years after the highway’s initial approval. ![]() Although the local governments eventually dropped the Outer Beltway project, the ICC remained on the counties’ infrastructure agenda. ![]() Initially conceived as a section of the proposed Outer Beltway that would fully encircle Washington, the ICC appeared on the master plans of both counties starting in 1950, at that time proposed as 32 miles. Maryland Route 200, also called the Intercounty Connector or simply the ICC by locals, is an 18.8-mile six-lane toll highway meant to provide an express road connection between the neighboring Maryland counties of Montgomery and Prince George’s, both of which are suburbs of Washington, DC.
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