Maryland horse farm, foundation square off over zoning for development
A Hanoverian horse grazes in the field at a farm owned by Betsy Smith, a pediatric HIV researcher, in New Market, Md., on Aug. 21. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
Betsy Smith, a pediatric HIV researcher, halters a horse at her farm in New Market, Md., on Aug. 21. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
The Eugene B. Casey Foundation is a mainstay of Washington-area philanthropy, awarding millions of dollars to recipients including the Washington National Opera, Suburban Hospital and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
But horse farm owner Betsy Smith and her neighbors say the foundation has been anything but charitable in its approach to land that it owns in southeast Frederick County, just past the Montgomery County line. The foundation received final approval last week from the Board of County Commissioners for a rezoning that will enable it to sell 634 acres to a developer for construction of more than 1,000 homes and townhomes in the New Market area. The foundation says it will use proceeds from the eventual sale to continue to fund its philanthropic work.
Opponents of the plans say such heavy residential construction will negatively impact the still largely rural area, especially the cleanliness of nearby Lake Linganore, a major water source. Critics also say the foundation has acted vindictively toward Smith, whose horse farm is surrounded by the Casey land, by proposing to cut off her access to the area’s main road and, until recently, refusing to commit to a buffer zone to shield the farm from the residential construction.
Smith’s attorney, Michelle Rosenfeld, says the foundation was trying to “put [Smith] out of business, so they can get the land.”
The tension began building after Smith declined an offer from Casey to join in its application for rezoning, a collaboration that, Smith says, could have led to her 35-acre farm being sold along with the Casey land so that more houses could be built.
Until the Board of County Commissioners intervened, Casey also refused to provide Smith’s property with an undeveloped buffer zone to shield the farm from residential construction — a commitment the foundation made earlier to other adjoining property owners.
A few weeks ago, a Casey representative came onto Smith’s property without permission and photographed runoff that contained horse manure. The foundation submitted the photos at a hearing to buttress arguments that Smith’s farm, which has 17 horses, two coon hounds and a cat — posed a greater threat to the Linganore watershed than the 1,000-plus home project.
Smith called the unauthorized entrance “creepy.”
“I think they were giving me the message that it was going to be very unpleasant to have a horse farm there in the future,” says Smith, a pediatric AIDS researcher at the National Institutes of Health who is also active in Cleanwater Linganore, a group trying to raise awareness of threats to the watershed posed by aggressive development.
“Absolutely not,” Casey’s chief financial officer, Donna Sheehan, says, dismissing the charges as baseless. Officials say the foundation had accessed Smith’s property in the past, without issue.
Robert Dalrymple, Casey’s attorney in the rezoning, says Smith’s decision not to partner with the foundation had no bearing on the actions that the foundation took.
“We just wanted to give her the chance. We were just trying to be good neighbors,” he says, calling Smith’s property “the hole in the doughnut.”
Smith and her late husband, a Johns Hopkins radiologist, outbid the foundation for the land in a 1990 auction. They were smitten with the old farm and, Smith says, only vaguely aware that the surrounding acreage could one day give way to subdivisions.
