Kevin Spradlin
Elizabeth Hughes, Maryland Historical Trust deputy director, said there is no appeals process "in those cases where a proposed change or alteration to an easement property is not permitted under the express conditions of these easement, as is the case with the Allegany County Courthouse." The Maryland Historical Trust holds 626 easements on onver 770 properties and 9,070 acres of land statewide. MHT holds 19 easements on properties in Allegany County.
CUMBERLAND — The right to free speech has nothing to do with a state agency’s rejection of a private group’s effort to build a monument to the U.S. Constitution on the lawn of the Allegany County Courthouse on Washington Street.
Instead, the director of the Maryland Historical Trust has rejected the request by the group, called Citizens for a Secular Government, based on a 12-year-old agreement between Allegany County government and the state.
The decision, made known in a Jan. 14 letter from J. Rodney Little to Barry Levine, assistant county attorney, comes not long after Levine expressed confidence that he had no reason to believe the project would not gain the trust’s approval and that the application would merely “have to go through the process.”
Not so fast, Little said. The terms of an easement agreed upon between the state and the county on Sept. 25, 1997, indicate that “no building, structure or improvement may be constructed or erected on the property other than those buildings, structures or improvements which are as of the date of this agreement located on the property ...”
“Therefore, I must deny your application on these grounds,” Little said.
Little said the county could remove or alter other structures in order to replace them with a new monument. A military cannon had been situated where the George Washington Memorial statue now stands.
The effort to have the Constitution monument erected was spearhead by local emergency room physician Jeffrey Davis and his group Citizens for a Secular Government. The Allegany County commissioners approved in September the size, inscription and location of the edifice. That approval was conditional upon receiving permission from the Maryland Historical Trust.
Howard Buchanan, a representative of the trust and a member of the commissioner-appointed steering committee that discussed details of the planned monument, said the state required the easement in 1997 after it agreed to fund a portion of a courthouse remodeling project.
Davis approached the commissioners in November 2007 to remind them of his preference to have the monument to the Ten Commandments removed from public property. Commissioners Jim Stakem and Bob Hutcheson have been consistent in refusing to move, for a second time, the Ten Commandments monument, which was moved in 2004 but returned within days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a similar case in Texas.
Stakem told Davis at that 2007 public meeting that the commissioners were not looking to add another monument to the courthouse lawn.
He, along with Hutcheson and Commissioner Dale Lewis, reversed their collective position a year ago when they agreed to appoint a committee to study the issue.
Neither Levine, Davis nor Veronica Mingolelli, a Cumberland resident and a representative of Davis’ group on the steering committee, was immediately available for comment. Neither Andrew Ratner, director of communications and education at Maryland Department of Planning, which oversees the Maryland Historical Trust, nor Elizabeth Schminke, easement administrator, responded to a request for comment.
Little’s letter left no indication whether there is an appeals process.
Contact Kevin Spradlin at kspradlin@times-news.com.
