Untold numbers of Annapolitans have recently received invitations from the National Lutheran Communities to attend luncheons to hear all about the planned development known now as The Village at Providence Point, to be located on Forest Drive adjacent to Spa Road.

It is unethical that this sales team should be permitted to market seniors for unbuilt units in a housing project that has not even received approval from the City of Annapolis. In fact, they are absolutely nowhere near approval.

The latest plans for the senior community of 351 units on the Crystal Spring property were filed on Jan. 22. They were so far off from meeting current basic state and local environmental laws, that it took the City of Annapolis Planning Department until June 12 to complete just the environmental review. This first round of comments from City planners is almost five pages and requires extensive and costly changes to the plans.

This is just the start as there are still two more phases of comments.

Not only do the village’s plans need to comply with basic laws and regulations; they completely disregarded requests made by community members. One of four primary requests made by the group Stop Crystal Spring early on in this contentious dialogue was to reduce the forest cleared and keep their pledge to replant 100% of forest cleared on site, which is now mandated under the city’s no net loss ordinance. But the plans filed in January proposed clearing 30 acres and replanting zero.

After almost 10 years of developing plans for this property, National Lutheran continues to try and force this “square peg into a round hole”, thereby completely ignoring the concerns of residents. We are pleased to know they are back still nowhere closer to building this inappropriate facility on Forest Drive.

ANNE PARKER, ANNAPOLIS

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