I chair Preserve Hughesville, a community advocacy group. A revitalization plan for the Hughesville village core has been completed and approved. It is a good plan, and people living in a community where this plan was implemented would be proud of their village. We seem to be having a little trouble, though. The plan is a guide for us to fulfill our dreams. We all have homes in the surrounding area, some from as early as the 1950s (mine) and some as late as last week, ranging up to $600,000 in cost (not mine). Some are our dream homes. Our biggest dream come true would be to have nothing new outside Hughesville until the revitalization of the village is implemented.

So far, two projects have been planned for Hughesville. One was the baseball stadium and the other is Chaney Enterprises' request to rezone its agricultural conservation parcel to heavy industrial. Neither is conducive to a rural setting. Frank Chaney wants to sell parcels of heavy industrial land to fulfill his dreams of a hall of charities and a branch of the College of Southern Maryland. Not so bad, right? But wait. What about the rest of the industrial parcels? Oh, Mr. Chaney says there is a slim possibility he will have to put a gravel-washing plant there. I guess after the county road from Post Office Road to Acton Lane goes through his property in Waldorf, he will have to move his washing plant to Hughesville. How else will he be able to develop the new growth corridor? And what would be built on the other industrial parcels in Hughesville? Oh, just your everyday, ordinary rural commercial endeavors: asphalt plants, auto graveyards, machine shops, saw mills, scrap materials, junkyards, salvage yards and a few other nasty little businesses.

We met with Mr. Chaney a while back. At that time, he offered to have covenants drawn up whereby anything we did not want to have built would not be built, with the possible exception of the gravel-washing plant. He plans to sell the lots, so how would these covenants have worked? Don't know.

Some say that Preserve Hughesville is against everything. But we have worked off and on with SMECO and Ray Mertz for about two years now. SMECO asked us to attend a presentation in its offices of a project to expand their operations. Mr. Mertz has been in contact with us for a few years on his project, Hughesville Station.

We feel that Chaney Enterprises does not have our interests at heart, only the dreams of Frank Chaney. In his letter to the Planning Commission, Mr. Chaney intimated that if he did not get this rezoning, that Chaney Enterprises might move out of the county. Actually his words were: "Our location in Waldorf is a major key to our success at Chaney Enterprises since 1962, as it has a Sand & Gravel Plant that can run when needed and without restrictions due to its zoning and still be within an economical range of our aggregate reserves in Southern Maryland. If the expansion of Post Office Road and Acton Lane takes away that advantage (without its Capacity being replaced), it will be our company, and all it does, that could easily be lost."