3P Vision – Local Voices and Environmental/Community Stewardship

The Perryman Peninsula seeks a future defined by clean water, safe neighborhoods, protected landscapes, and equitable access to opportunity. The vision is to move Perryman from a historically overburdened “sacrifice zone” to a resilient, thriving community grounded in environmental stewardship, cultural heritage, and public health.

This vision prioritizes:

- Reversing Environmental and Racial Injustices: Transforming properties like Mitchell Farm into recreational and historical park land and preserving/improving community integrity is needed to rectify historical and systemic environmental injustices and ensure equal access to a clean, safe living environment for all communities, regardless of race or income.
- Promoting Community-Centered Development: Ensuring future growth is compatible with a healthy environment, values, traditions, and institutions that create a strong sense of community. This means prioritizing detailed infrastructure planning, adequate space for vital community services, and protecting natural environments and wildlife.
- Bolstering Infrastructure and Public Safety: Bolstering infrastructure that has historically been denied to marginalized communities and ensuring first-rate emergency assistance and law enforcement coverage.
- Providing Green Space Access and Community Recreation Focus: Despite its extensive shoreline and ecological resources, Perryman has limited safe and accessible green spaces. Parks are small, disconnected, not focused on community needs, and lack amenities common elsewhere in Harford County. Providing safe, accessible green spaces and public access to waterways, needed as a catalyst for community well-being.
- Acknowledging Historic Contributions: Recognizing, preserving, and promoting Perryman’s significant historic role in early American, Maryland, and Harford history. From native peoples, Captain John Smith, Old Baltimore, agriculture/canning, slavery, transportation, to APG, Perryman’s historic contributions have been mostly ignored and lost to overdevelopment.
- Enabling Sustainable Economic Development: Industrial growth has not produced broad economic benefit for residents. Fostering economic growth that coexists with environmental justice, creating job opportunities while enhancing property values for marginalized communities. This includes supporting local agriculture and heritage tourism.
- Developing Collaborative Planning and Governance: Building positive working relationships with local government offices, elected officials, landowners, and developers to achieve thoughtful planning and sustainable design.

Codifying Public Policy: Developing, enacting, and enforcing policy that codifies the preservation of Harford’s remaining green spaces and balances environmental and quality of life with growth pressures regardless of economic overlays.

This vision seeks to avoid “bad development and careless irreversible environmental damage”, and instead, to “turn the tide” for Perryman’s path from a sacrifice zone to a sustainable community for a healthier Chesapeake Bay and Harford County.

VISION PILLAR 1 – Reversing Environmental and Racial Injustices

Background – For decades, Perryman has absorbed disproportionate environmental burdens while receiving fewer public investments than other areas of Harford County. Industrial uses were concentrated near racially diverse and lower-income neighborhoods, compounding flood, pollution, and safety risks. Transforming Mitchell Farm into a publicly accessible park and recharge-area preserve helps correct these long-standing inequities.

Facts

Perryman households experience higher poverty rates and lower property values than the county average.
Perryman is in Census Tract 24025302400 with an Maryland Environmental Justice score of 81.80 (highest in Harford County) and is designated as an Overburdened and Underserved Community.
The peninsula sits within an impaired watershed and directly above the Perryman Wellfield.
Industrial impervious surface expansion outpaced road, stormwater, and public-facility upgrades.

Actions

Convert Mitchell Farm to preserved parkland and agricultural open space.
Update Master Plan land use designations to prevent further industrial concentration in vulnerable residential areas.
Adopt and enforce wellfield and watershed protection standards.
Ensure future land-use decisions reduce—not increase—cumulative environmental and community burden.

VISION PILLAR 2 – Promoting Community-Centered Development

Background – Growth has long been shaped around freight movement rather than community needs. Perryman lacks a community center, basic public services, and accessible green space. Community-centered development reframes planning to prioritize health, daily life, and neighborhood identity.

Facts

No community facility exists on the peninsula.
Industrial truck traffic conflicts with residential streets and walkability/bikeability.
Green buffers and civic spaces common elsewhere in the county are absent.
Priority has been on generic economic development instead of community-centered development.

Actions

Reserve land for community services, healthcare access, and civic uses.
Require compatibility standards for all development near homes or wellfield recharge areas.
Integrate green infrastructure and a walkable and bikeable design in all new projects.
Align development with community needs rather than industrialization demand.

VISION PILLAR 3 – Bolstering Infrastructure and Public Safety

Background – Industrial growth far exceeded the capacity of local infrastructure. Emergency response times, stormwater systems, and transportation access suffer from a mismatch between land-use intensity and public safety needs.

Facts

Perryman relies on a single constrained access point for emergency response.
Industrial truck volumes exceed the design capacity of Perryman Road and Spesutia Road.
The existing Perryman fire station predates most of the industrial development on the peninsula.

Actions

- Update the Perryman EMS/fire substation to meet demands of the many new freight distribution and other industrialization.
- Implement watershed-safe road improvements and emergency-access upgrades.
- Require public-safety impact analysis for all major land-use proposals.
- Prioritize stormwater retrofits in older residential areas.
- Complete transportation and pedestrian infrastructure before approving more industrial uses.

Base land use limits on adequate infrastructure and avoidance of public safety issues.

VISION PILLAR 4 – Providing Green Space Access and Community Recreation

Background – Despite its extensive shoreline and ecological resources, Perryman has limited safe and accessible green spaces. Parks are small, disconnected, and lack amenities common elsewhere in Harford County.

Facts

Perryman Park is undersized and lacks restrooms, water access, and gathering spaces.
Waterfront access is limited despite the peninsula’s geography.
Forest Greens Lake Preserve remains underdeveloped for public recreation.

Actions

Create a regional or state park at Mitchell Farm.
Expand waterfront access for boating, fishing, trails, and environmental education.
Connect parks via greenways and multi-use trails.
Enhance green space and recreation near Bush River and Spesutia Road neighborhoods.
Any recreational development must address community needs and balance their benefits vs burdens.

VISION PILLAR 5 – Acknowledging and Preserving Historic Contributions

Background – Perryman is one of Maryland’s earliest colonial and agricultural landscapes. Many historic sites face pressure from incompatible development, threatening a unique cultural heritage.

Facts

The area includes early colonial settlements, canning-era properties, and Indigenous sites.
Archaeological resources are at risk from ongoing industrial expansion.
No designated historic district currently protects the Perryman–Spesutia Church corridor.

Actions

Historic preservation should function as a land-use protection tool.
Establish a local historic district around key cultural resources.
Integrate heritage interpretation into park and open-space planning.
Require context-sensitive design for new development near historic properties.
Document and preserve archaeological resources.

VISION PILLAR 6 – Enabling Sustainable Economic Development

Background – Industrial growth has not produced broad economic benefit for residents. Perryman needs balanced, resilient economic strategies aligned with environmental limits and community priorities.

Facts

The peninsula has millions of square feet of industrial space with significant vacancy.
Job opportunities in freight distribution and construction contracts are often temporary and not filled by local residents.
Property values remain lower than countywide averages.

Actions

Support agriculture, recreation, heritage tourism, and small business growth.
Reduce over-concentration of freight-dependent and industrial uses and eliminate industrialization to west of Perryman Road.
Tie economic incentives to community benefit and environmental performance.
Prioritize redevelopment and infill over new greenfield industrial expansion.
Differentiate industrial expansion from sustainable economic development.

VISION PILLAR 7 – Developing Collaborative Planning and Governance

Background – Sustainable progress requires strong relationships between residents, county staff, state agencies, and landowners. Without transparent collaboration, land-use conflicts and inequities persist.

Facts

Residents often learn about major projects late in the review process, sometimes due to NDAs.
Past planning cycles incorporated Master plans and community vision documents in only a limited way.
Multiple agencies share overlapping authority over transportation, wellfields, flooding, and land use.

Actions

Formalize community participation in planning, Master Plan development, and zoning processes.
Establish regular coordination between 3P, county departments, city of Aberdeen, and state and federal partners.
Require early public engagement for all major land-use proposals while eliminating transparency barriers such as Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA).
Use shared data systems to monitor water quality, traffic, and environmental health.

VISION PILLAR 8 – Codifying Public Policy for Long-Term Environmental and Community Protection

Background – Without durable protections, sensitive areas remain vulnerable to speculative industrial proposals and incremental harm. Codifying policies provides predictability, transparency, and fairness.

Facts

Perryman contains wellfield recharge zones, impaired waterways, and natural habitat areas.
Enterprise zone incentives intensified industrial pressures.
Enforcement and monitoring of environmental and community equity has been limited.

Actions

Let the Aberdeen/Havre de Grace Enterprise Zone expire in 2026.
Remove all incentives from environmentally constrained areas, undeveloped open fields and farmland and require measurable environmental performance standards for development.
Update the “Source Water Assessment for The Perryman Well Field.”, Perryman Wellhead Protection Plan, Bush River Watershed Management, and Small Watershed Assessment.
Create wellfield, flood hazard, and green infrastructure overlay districts.
Align zoning, subdivision rules, and capital planning with watershed-based management.
Modernize code to address new industrial uses (freight distribution, data centers, battery storage, power generation).