More Government Insanity

In case you're not aware, I sit on my neighborhood home owners association's board of directors. We are only in our 3rd year as a neighborhood and the developer is almost done. Over the past few years, I've gotten quite an education about many things. We're up in Clarksburg, Maryland, where the county's Park & Planning Department made a series of errors that were widely publicized.

Fortunately, my neighborhood was not one of those affected, but we are affected by the Park & Planning Department nonetheless. My latest lesson comes in the areas of "site plans". Basically if it's on the site plan and you want to change something, you need to file papers with Park & Planning to get it approved. This may or may not happen.

The site plan that covers my neighborhood calls for Ash trees to line all of one street on both sides. These past 2 summers have featured some hot, dry spells and these trees have not done well. The developer will replace the trees, but he must replace them with the same type of tree. So, we have trees that aren't very drought tolerant when they're young, but the developer has no choice, because it's on the site plan. No, they aren't going to spend a few thousand more dollars to have an amended site plan drawn up so that they could plant a different species of tree.

I'm also wary of Ash trees because of the Emerald Ash Borer. This bug has devastated these trees in the Midwest and they have caused some problems around Clinton and Brandywine in Prince Georges counties. Here's a story about the Emerald Ash Borer that I did last October.

It's frustrating to realize that the future for these trees is bleak and that more money and effort will be expended in another year or two to replace them. Perhaps by then the county planners will wake up and allow for some substitutions.

If you think this is isolated, we also have azaleas around the neighborhood that are placed in full sunshine. A Master Gardener friend of mine told me that you never place azaleas in full sunshine. It's not good for them. We've also had a bunch of azaleas die off that the developer will replace with, you guessed it, more azaleas.

I must be crazy, but I would expect that the people who are designing and approving these landscape plans would at least have some basic understanding of how plants work. Considering that the citizens of Montgomery county pay their salaries, these deficiencies are shameful!