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At the Nov. 16 work session, the Berwyn Heights Town Council voted to object to plans that could pollute the water in Indian Creek.

Indian Creek, which originates near Interstate 95 in Laurel and runs down close to the Beltsville Industrial Park near College Park, was originally included in plans to mitigate the effects of the Intercounty Connector, an 18.8-mile toll highway being built between Laurel and Gaithersburg. The projects that would have required landscaping the banks of Indian Creek so the water will remain clean were canceled in early October.

When those plans were scrapped by the Interagency Working Group, Prince George's County Councilman Thomas E. Dernoga (D-Dist. 1) of Laurel wrote a letter to the State Highway Administration opposing canceling those changes.

"The ICC has long been a Montgomery County road project that SHA has forced on Prince George's County, and SHA is continuing to provide benefits to Montgomery County at the expense of Prince George's County," Dernoga wrote in his Oct. 26 letter to the SHA. "...The IAWG totally discounts the value of Indian Creek restoration projects and focuses almost entirely on Montgomery County projects."

The IAWG scrapped the Beltsville Industrial Park Indian Creek restoration, four restoration projects in Indian Creek downstream near I-95 and a wetland project at Old Gunpowder Road in Beltsville, while the project near MD-212 was cut by 50 percent. That project would allow the stream to access its floodplain during high flows and helping to relieve stream bank erosion and restoring the water quality of the floodplain and the recovery of the instream habitat.

"Upon further examination, that particular area didn't need as much work as what was previously thought," said ICC Media Relations spokeswoman Fran Counihan.

Counihan said the anticipated length of the project was reduced due to the natural recovery that has occurred within the stream channel in the last few years, due mostly to beavers building dams that slow the flows and allow sediment to form stable stream features.

"We are still assessing the entire length of the reach to see if it meets our original restoration goals and will know better the project limits when that assessment is completed next spring," she said in an e-mail.

Masaya Maeda, a water quality specialist with the Anacostia Watershed Society, said that the ICC has been doing a "good job" about keeping sediment down at Indian Creek.

"Our primary concern is sediment, and we have not seen significant sediment at Indian Creek," Maeda said. "It does have some existing pollution, but it is better than it was a few years ago because the sides are covered with grass, which decreases sediment."

The projects that were reduced or eliminated in Montgomery County included two stretches of Paint Branch near Hollywood and Good Hope and portions of the Northwest Branch near Bel Pre Creek.

On Nov. 16, the Berwyn Heights Town Council voted to send a letter in support of Dernoga's letter.

"I think [the ICC] could have been done well, but they've made a lot of decisions on it, like removing a hiker/biker trail, that I think is silly. There have been a lot of things like that that really struck a nerve with me," said Mayor Cheye Calvo at the Nov. 16 work session.

Councilman James Wilkinson said he didn't appreciate the removal of the Indian Creek mitigation.

"A lot of the problems have to do with the fact that the ICC was built in Montgomery County and now they're home-free saying ‘Everything's mitigated. Trust us.' And I don't believe it or appreciate it," Wilkinson said.

Calvo said that Berwyn Heights was one of the only towns to support the ICC, save for Laurel, and that his view of the highway system had been tainted by the process.

"The whole ICC has undermined my faith in the way we build highways," Calvo said.

E-mail Jordan Attebury at jattebury@gazette.net.