A split vote by the St. Mary’s County Commissioners has blocked the county from applying for a $3.5 million federal grant that would have helped fund improvements at Shannon Farms Park, a Chesapeake Bay-front property the county has been developing for passive recreation since 2023.
The vote came during the Sept. 1 business meeting’s County Administrator Time, the final item on a five-part agenda that otherwise passed without dispute — including grant applications for a jail-based opioid treatment program, substance abuse treatment partnerships with the Health Department, a tree-planting mitigation agreement with the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and a senior transportation grant. The application for the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program grant failed 2-2, with Commissioners John Hewitt and Scott Ostrow opposed and Commissioner President James Guy absent, according to Commissioner Eric Colvin’s account and the county’s own official meeting summary, both of which describe the vote identically.
Colvin, who voted in favor, called the result “mind-boggling” in a public statement, noting that matching funds for the park already exist in the county’s Capital Improvement Program budget, meaning the federal grant would have offset money the county is already planning to spend rather than adding a new financial obligation.
The county’s official meeting rollup describes the outcome using the phrase “did not approve.” A separate account provided to this outlet indicated the county’s Public Information Office later characterized the outcome as “denied” — but that language could not be independently confirmed in any publicly available version of the meeting record as of publication. Readers can review the vote directly in the county’s own recording of the meeting, available on St. Mary’s County Government’s YouTube channel, at the 1:06:37 mark.
Shannon Farms Park sits on the Chesapeake Bay south of Naval Air Station Patuxent River. The nearly entirely forested, wetland-rich property was previously approved for a large residential subdivision of more than 700 homes under zoning rules that predated the county’s Critical Area Program; it’s now governed by a conservation easement with the U.S. Navy. The county’s 2023 Master Plan for the site envisions passive recreation — beach and water access, ADA-accessible paths, gathering spaces, and a playground — rather than large-scale active-use facilities.
That vision may be relevant to why the vote split the way it did, though no public statement from Hewitt or Ostrow explaining their opposition was found. The Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership program itself, according to the National Park Service’s own guidelines and multiple state agencies that administer its funds, is specifically targeted at urban communities of at least 25,000 to 30,000 people that are considered underserved and economically disadvantaged in terms of outdoor recreation access. Shannon Farms Park — a rural, forested former farm property — doesn’t obviously fit that profile as described in the program’s own national materials, a factor that may or may not have influenced Tuesday’s vote but is directly relevant to evaluating the application’s competitiveness regardless of the outcome.
