Maryland Community Newspapers Online
Montgomery County NAACP leaders Friday morning plan to begin removing debris from a blocked road that has cut off some black landowners in Sandy Spring from their property.
They have invited reporters to the event to draw attention to the property owners' ongoing struggle to get building permits that the county's planning agency has denied since 2006. Planners say the road doesn't appear in current county road records and that road access for emergency vehicles is required before addresses can be issued.
At a court hearing in August, U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus urged the plaintiffs to consider mediation to settle the dispute with the county planning agency, neighbor Christine Hill Wilson and an engineering and survey firm accused by the plaintiffs of fraudulently submitting documents to remove the road from records.
At the time, a lawyer for Wilson told the judge that she agreed to move vehicles her family has parked on "Farm Road," which, according to evidence presented in court, appears to cross the adjoining property of the Sandy Spring slave museum.
On Monday, Roy Austin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, filed a letter in court stating that Wilson refused to move the vehicles, then told the plaintiffs to contact her lawyer.
It's a "stalling tactic" and part of a scheme to deprive hard-working folks of the use and value of their "greatest tangible asset," said Montgomery County NAACP President Henry Hailstock.
