In 1993, I was approached by the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg to write a series of articles for their newsletter. I was approached because much of my writing as a newspaper reporter had been on the effects of growth on the county.

The articles appeared under my byline and, incidentally, with the approval of my editor. An abbreviated form of the series appeared in he Evening Sun some time later.

With the permission of the Lawrences and the FNPG, here is the second of the five newsletter articles. Naturally, over the passage of time, some of this information has become outdated.

Yours,
Terry W. Burger
Gettysburg: 11/27/97

Like sharks circling: All roads lead to Gettysburg

The very factors that make the area around and near the Gettysburg National Military Park and the Eisenhower National Historic Site attractive are the parks' worst enemies.

Rural and even wilderness areas combined with important historic resources have drawn visitors to the area for more than a century. A number of those have returned to live in the region.

Most notable were Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, who purchased a farm outside of Gettysburg in 1950, though they were unable to live there full-time until 1961, when "Ike" left the presidency.

A number of Secret Service agents who served under Eisenhower and other U.S. Presidents retired to the Gettysburg area as well, as have many military personnel who had at one time or another been stationed at one of several military bases within a short drive of Adams County.

Residential and commercial development in the area around the national parks at Gettysburg has remained steady over recent decades, with few "spikes" in the growth curve.

As a result, the "parkscape" has remained relatively pristine, compared to memorial parks in more urban areas. But protecting the battlefield setting has not been easy, nor always successful.

Indications are that slow curve may take a sharp upward turn in the near future.

Robert Monahan Jr., a Gettysburg businessman and real estate developer, said in a recent interview that the 'pristine' quality of the parks in Gettysburg will become more important as more and more area in the region is taken over by development.

"I think over the long haul what the park has done preservation-wise has significantly added to the beauty of the area," Monahan said. "I think that will be of major significance as growth and development take place surrounding Gettysburg. In the next 10 years I see a tremendous increase in the number of people who want to escape the crime, violence and taxes of the Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia area. If you look around the northeast, people realize this is a very attractive area for them to live."

Factors funnelling new growth into the Gettysburg area include a number of transportation projects that will likely change the quality of the park environment forever. Some of those factors include:

#: - The completion in September 1990 of Route 15, the main North-South artery connecting Harrisburg with Baltimore and Washington. The completion of the project has already caused a marked increase in commercial development - planned and completed - around several of the local interchanges on Route 15.

Less obvious but perhaps more importantly, the completion of the highway has made the already short commute between the Gettysburg area and the Baltimore-Washington area easier. A worker who lives within an easy drive to Route 15 can be in the heart of the nation's capital in about two hours.

Route 15 is not the only factor bringing the Baltimore-Washington section of the east coast megalopolis closer to Gettysburg, however;

#: - Continued plans to improve access from I-795, a feeder route extending north out of Baltimore, to the Pennsylvania state line near Hanover, York County, just to the east of Gettysburg, is expected to inject Gettysburg's home county with more residences and businesses.

Pa. Route 94 slants from Hanover, near Adams County's southeast corner, along the county's eastern side, under Route 15 and then out of the county at its northern end. When completed, the project will prise open that highway corridor to Baltimore, which is only 42 miles from Hanover, opening another easy access for urban workers to the as-yet rural countryside near Gettysburg.

According to the "Hanover/Baltimore Pike Corridor Study," published in August of 1993 by the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, the populations in that part of Adams County on either side of Route 94 will climb from roughly 33,000 persons in 1990 to nearly 45,000 two decades later.

Put another way, that translates, again according to the corridor study, to an additional 6,000 occupied housing units. All those new people mean more roads, more services (schools, fire, police, trash disposal, etc.) and higher taxes. Studies have shown that residential development is expensive to a municipality. In other words, a single-family residence (SFR) with one or two children needing to be schooled costs the community more to service than the combined taxes it brings in.

How much local traffic will such new development create? Professional planners use a rule of thumb of an average of 10 trips per day (TPD) for a single-family dwelling. The total includes driving to and from work, trips to school, to the convenience store, to run a few errands.

Given that the bulk of housing built in Adams County has historically been SFR, 6,000 new homes would translate to an average of 60,000 new TPD, in large part due to the opening of the Route 94 corridor to Baltimore traffic.

Some other transportation plans, centered not so close to the battlefield area may still have a profound impact on development in the area around the parks.

#: - In the Virginia-Maryland area, at least three major transportation plans are in various stages of existence, and all of them will go further toward making the Gettysburg-Adams County area more of a 'suburb' of the Baltimore-Washington region.

#: - The largest project is a proposed additional bypass around the nation's capital.

Public hearings were held on the proposed new highway in 1990 by the project's joint sponsors, the transportation departments of Maryland and Virginia.

One of the three proposed routes for the bypass would funnel much of the traffic heading north on I-95 up to Route 15 south of Frederick, Maryland, a little more than 30 miles south of Gettysburg.

At one of those hearings, James Wynn, an assistant division chief with the Maryland Highway Administration Project Planning Division, said the highway was in the "first tier" of planning.

"If everything works out, we'll begin construction in eight to 10 years," Wynn said.

Though he admitted the project might meet enough opposition that it would be dropped, Wynn said he thought a bypass around the nation's capitol would be inevitable sooner or later.

#: - Highways are not the only transportation project planned that would bring the Gettysburg area closer to becoming more of a suburb to the megalopolis. Also in the works is a proposal to extend a transit line from Frederick to link up with the Washington metro system at Clarksburg, Md., according to the "I-270 Corridor Cities Transit Easement, Frederick County Extension Study," published in March of 1991.

#: - A light rail line linking Owings Mill, Md. to Baltimore is already in service. The Owings Mill station is little more than a half hour drive from the Gettysburg area.

#: - Yet another rail project will link the D.C. area to Frederick. The "1993-1998 Consolidated Transportation Program" published by the Maryland Department of Transportation depicts a commuter rail line from Frederick to Point of Rocks, Md., to provide direct rail access to Union Station in Washington.

Pipe dreams?

"The line is proposed to be operational by 1998," Frederick County Planner James A. Gugel wrote in August of 1993, referring to the Point of Rocks project.

Ron Kirby, director of the District of Columbia Transportation Planning Board said on August 30, 1993, that neither the plan to extend light rail transportation along I-270 to Frederick and the plan to build an outer bypass to the District have gotten to the funding stage.

"But I don't think the question is if they will happen, but when," he said.

#: - In Adams County itself, The major east-west route through the geographical and economic center of the county - U.S. Route 30, is slated for major improvements.

Part of The Lincoln Highway, the nation's first official transcontinental route, Route 30 just east of Gettysburg bears a traffic volume of more than 12,000 vehicles per day, about 10 percent of them heavy trucks, according to a recent state-funded traffic survey. That number reflects an increase of nearly 52 percent higher than the results of a similar survey performed 18 years earlier.

Route 30 is the major - though not the only - link to neighboring York County, where already nearly 10,000 of Adams County's 40,000 workers journey to work every day.

More to the point, it is the major route used daily by nearly 10,000 of York County's workers who live in Adams County.

Not that new roads are a strange phenomena in Adams County. The original county map now in use was printed in 1980 or 1981, according to the county planning office. Five or six years ago, the map had to be revised with the addition of about 50 miles of new residential roads. Most of the new roads were built in the southeast corner of the county, nearest the Baltimore-Washington area, and only 10 miles from Gettysburg.

Once the people funnelled into the area by enhanced transportation corridors move into the Gettysburg area, the burden placed on the county's communities, and on the two NPS sites near Gettysburg, will also increase exponentially.

A county-financed study of growth patterns completed recently indicated a growth in population from just under 80,000 at present to more than 100,000 in the next 10 to 20 years.

Residential growth in the Gettysburg area has remained steady, despite a national recession and a slow jobs market. A number of planners and developers have said off-the-record in recent years that "things will get going really good when the economy opens up," as one put it.

Even with the economy not yet "opened up," a check of building permits issued in Adams County from 1985 through 1992 showed that the number of new residences in the county has maintained a steady climb.

According to the records, an average of 706 new residential units were permitted over that period. Most of those permits were for single-family homes, but a significant proportion were for apartments and other rental units. About 800 permits were issued for mobile homes.

Among the many examples of data acquired on numbers of jobs, houses, and commercial establishments expected to accompany that growth is a concern on the part of planners for the lack of recreational facilities in the area. That lack, plus the "ordinary" burden of 1.25 to 1.5 million visitors every year to the national parks, and the demands of special-interest groups, such as trail-bike riders, is putting tremendous recreational pressure on a park whose charter from Congress sets it aside as a memorial.

Residential and commercial growth in the entire eastern seaboard area means a need for more utilities as well. In the late spring of 1991 two major utility companies announced plans to run a 500,000-volt power line from a coal-fired generating plan in the western part of the state to Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg.

Local opposition helped to scrap that project by late 1993, but part of that 278-mile-long line was laid out to pass through the northern part of Adams County, one of the most productive fruit-growing regions in the U.S. Though not a direct threat to the battlefield, county leaders, feared the line could be a factor in limiting the number of tourists who visit the 'fruitbelt,' thereby reducing by some percentage the number of visitors who would have come to see both areas.

There is a potential direct impact to the national parks from an electric utility, however. Metropolitan Edison, one of the firms involved in the 500kv line dispute with the county, owns a right-of-way for a 115,000-volt power line that will pass, when built, within the "view shed" of the Eisenhower Farm. Some sources have indicated this line will be constructed sometime in the next decade.

The next and final installment of this series will look in closer detail at land acquisition efforts by private groups, organizations and the federal government itself. Included will be a look at a controversial 1990 land swap between the NPS and Gettysburg College, which has prompted a review by a subcommittee of the U.S. Congress, and how that deal may affect future preservation efforts.