If the highway is ever finished, the SHA estimates that 67,000 cars and heavy trucks a day will pass that playground. Studies in other areas have shown a substantial increase is asthma and other lung problems in children who live or otherwise spend a lot of time near freeways.
As a sign said, every day will be a Code Red air day for the children at Drew if the ICC ever opens!

Those 67,000 cars will replace a cathedral forest supporting great trees and massive fields of ferns. The water in the Good Hope tributary to paint Branch(of the ANACOSTIA, folks!) is almost crystal-clear. Area residents were invited to travel to Derwood and look at the remains of "Mill Culvert" to see the fate the SHA has in mind for Good Hope Tributary.

It came out during the introduction that when the Montgomery County Council floated plans to sell off ICC "wrong of way" after the road was "killed" in the late '90's, pro-ICC legislators from Annapolis showed up at the council's meeting. They threatened to revoke the council's land use powers and screw Montgomery financially by any and all means if the Council dared turn ICC lands into parks.

At the community meeting after the park, it was pointed out that dirty tactics and phony hearings were used to take residents directly from believing the ICC would never be built to thinking it was "a done deal" with ZERO real debate in between. That fast-tracked EIS was one of ten projects Bu$h himself selected for this kind of treatment! Against this sort of tactics, normal modes of opposition had no more chance than the ICC's trees do against that double claw and rotary saw tree-removal machine mentioned by a resident in the community meeting(to gasps from the crowd).

This being so, perhaps some asymmetrical tactics are needed. Suppose the ICC's contractors were to find themselves unable to rent Portajohns after an HLS type campaign against Bobbie's potties? Suppose the Sheperdstown PEF folks get the job done and drive Americast off the project? If banking, insurance, concrete castings, and even portajohns become hard to get, construction will slow to a crawl, buying time for the appeals court to hear the case before it becomes moot. That's how Earth First campaigns out West work-they buy time until other means can catch up.