On the same day Audubon Naturalist Society officials learned a federal judge denied their attempt to block construction of the controversial Intercounty Connector, a curious e-mail arrived from an address owned by the then-chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party.
“Denied, Denied, Denied, and Denied!!!!” the author wrote under the picture of a crying baby. “Again you pathetic enviro-wacks lose! Go ICC!”
The e-mail angered some county Republicans and Audubon Naturalist officials, who have called the e-mail, sent from Tom Reinheimer’s address, “sophomoric.”
“I thought it was really shocking,” Dolores Milmoe, Maryland conservation associate for the Audubon Society, said Wednesday. “It was really uncalled for.”
Reinheimer, who chaired the party on Nov. 8, the day the e-mail was sent, would not confirm or deny authoring it, saying instead that his address must have been hijacked.
“If it was coming from the chairman of the Republican Party, I would have signed it Tom Reinheimer, chairman of the Republican Party,” he said.
Still, Reinheimer, a former at-large candidate for the County Council and well-known advocate of the ICC, which will connect Interstate 270 in Montgomery County with I-95 in Prince George’s, accused the Audubon Naturalist Society and other conservation groups that filed federal lawsuits attempting to block construction of the 18-mile toll road of having “consistently tried to put up roadblocks to transportation” initiatives.
“Something’s got to be done to improve transportation in the area,” Reinheimer said.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. denied claims brought by the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense that the road wasn’t fully studied and that it would violate the Clean Air Act.
Republican Bill Roberts saidthe county’s GOP membership should be reaching out to environmental groups.
“There’s no sense in swinging the pendulum so far the other way that you alienate these groups,” Roberts said.
But while a handful of the county’s 120,000 registered Republicans may have been angered by the e-mail, it doesn’t seem to have been a factor in Reinheimer’s defeat in his bid for another term as county chairman this
week.
The county party named Bill Witham its new leader at a leadership meeting Tuesday.
Witham said he knew nothing about the e-mail Wednesday.
