Family Paradise In Jeopardy

Photos courtesy of Spencer Miller

Spencer Miller and his family found the perfect place to call home, nestled among dense virgin forest, a creek, and untouched wilderness that acts as a flourishing habitat for natures bounty. His 20 acres of picturesque land is situated along Bear Creek and adjacent to Savage River Forest.

Places like the Miller's are becoming increasingly rare, once valued and highly regarded in Maryland, a state that boasts its conservation and environmental protection laws. Yet, when a plan to expand energy infrastructure was presented to the 2025 Maryland General Assembly, overwhelming support discarded the state's historical defense of its untouched lands, granting carte blanche to NextEra Energy's proposal to rip through precious Wildlands in Garrett and Allegany Counties. Voters are paying close attention to this issue across the state with plans to take responsive action in the next election cycle.

Bear Creek to be impacted by the 200-foot easement.

Many are asking how this happened, including Spencer, whose property falls in the path of a proposed transmission line for the MidAtlantic Resiliency Link (MARL), a project that is characterized as necessary to stabilize a power grid experiencing exponential growth. What Spencer and other residents of Garrett County are asking is "Why us?" And it's a fair question, considering the transmission lines don't serve Maryland rate-payers, but is merely being constructed to power glutenous data centers in Loudon County, Virginia, located outside of Washington, D.C.

This Northern Virginia county houses the largest number data processing facilities, four times that of any other location globally. The massive structures are feeding the sudden surge to process artificial intelligence (AI), which is becoming commonly used for everything from writing assistance, to Chat GPT, to high-end video and music production. AI has fallen under fire for replacing humans in a multitude of professional disciplines, drawing added criticism of power generation that supports it.

Today, Bear Creek is picturesque and peacefull.

Spencer and many others are outraged that Garrett County's distinct and greatest asset is under siege, which is why he is taking action to stop the project, encouraging Maryland officials to reevaluate what is at risk. The forests and habitats can't be remade, regardless of what NextEra Energy claims. Replanting virgin forests that where shaped by nature's cycles over the course of thousands of years is nothing short of arrogant and reckless.

Below is Mr. Miller's letter, which he hopes will educate the Maryland Public Service Commission, and possibly lead them to avoiding a misstep that can't be undone.

7 February 2026 

Jamie Bergin, Chief Clerk 

Maryland Public Service Commission 

6 Saint Paul Street, 16th Floor 

Baltimore, MD 21202-6806 

RE: Public Comment – Case No. 9857 (MidAtlantic Resiliency Link Project) 

Dear Mr. Bergin and Members of the Commission:

I urge the Commission to deny the CPCN for the MidAtlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) as proposed through Garrett County. MARL is not a local reliability project. It is part of PJM’s multi-billion-dollar transmission expansion built primarily to serve massive new data center load—up to 7,500 MW—in Northern Virginia and Maryland. Garrett County residents are being asked to shoulder the environmental, aesthetic, and economic burdens of a 500-kV interstate corridor that does not provide us with any measurable improvement in electric service reliability or power quality. 

My family’s property directly borders the existing 200-foot transmission right-of-way. MARL would add another 200-foot easement beside it, creating a 400-foot industrialized corridor behind our home and fully eliminating the forested buffer between the current ROW and Bear Creek. This buffer is the last remaining natural protection for the Bear Creek watershed—one of the county’s most cherished cold-water streams and the water source for the Maryland DNR Bear Creek Trout Hatchery downstream. 

The loss of this forested buffer has several serious consequences: 

1) Direct degradation of the Bear Creek watershed. 

• Forested riparian buffers are scientifically proven to reduce sediment, nutrient runoff, erosion, and water-quality degradation. Removing this buffer on steep terrain near the creek exposes Bear Creek to increased turbidity, warming, and pollutant pulses. 

2) Risk to the state-operated Bear Creek Trout Hatchery. 

• The hatchery is a stream-fed facility drawing water directly from Bear Creek. Any sedimentation, herbicide drift, or chemical runoff from a widened ROW or new 

• access roads has a realistic potential to affect the hatchery’s intake water quality, threaten trout health, and disrupt statewide stocking programs. 

3) Introduction of herbicides into the watershed due to ROW vegetation management. 

• Transmission rights-of-way are not simply cleared once—they are chemically managed for decades. Industry vegetation-management programs routinely use herbicides across transmission corridors as part of “Integrated Vegetation Management” (IVM). These treatments include foliar sprays, basal applications, stump treatments, and selective broadcast applications. Herbicides are applied to maintain low vegetation, suppress regrowth, and keep trees from encroaching on conductors. 

• This means that the newly created 200-foot clearing between the existing ROW and Bear Creek would become a long-term herbicide-treated corridor, located directly uphill from a trout stream and state hatchery that depends on consistent, clean water. Herbicide use is well documented across North American investor-owned utilities, with over 75% reporting active use of herbicides in their transmission ROWs. Once this buffering forest is removed, there is nothing to prevent rain events from carrying herbicide residues, solubilized chemicals, or soil-bound contaminants toward Bear Creek’s channel. 

4) Construction access roads will create additional sediment pathways. 

• Transmission construction requires 12–20-foot access roads, often expanding up to 40 feet for heavy equipment. These road cuts create further runoff channels and slope destabilization directly above the creek. 

5) Garrett County receives no direct benefit. 

• MARL is a regional bulk-power corridor, not a distribution upgrade for local service. It does not add feeders, redundancy, voltage support, or local reliability enhancements to our county’s electric infrastructure. We are being asked to sacrifice our watershed, our property values, and our rural character to deliver power to meet data-center-driven demand in another state. 

6) Virginia, not Maryland, is driving this project. 

• Northern Virginia’s explosive AI-driven data center growth is the primary reason PJM is expanding transmission capacity. If Virginia needs more clean, reliable power for data centers, Virginia must find ways to develop new generation—clean baseload, storage, renewables, or advanced nuclear—and must not externalize the environmental burden onto rural Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. 

There are alternative solutions that place responsibility where it belongs: 

• Localized clean-firm generation near data centers 

• Demand-management solutions for data center clusters 

• On-site or co-located advanced nuclear (e.g., SMRs) being actively explored by Dominion and Amazon 

• Greater integration of storage and efficiency commitments 

Virginia has options. Widening transmission corridors through Bear Creek is simply the most harmful one—and the one that provides Maryland with no meaningful benefit. 

Requested Commission Actions 

• Deny the CPCN as proposed or require rerouting that avoids the Bear Creek watershed and preserves the existing forest buffer. 

• Require a formal beneficiaries analysis—quantifying who truly benefits and what, if any, reliability improvement Garrett County receives. 

• Require a full alternatives analysis under Maryland Public Utilities Article §7-209, including demand-side and clean-generation options in the regions driving the load. 

• Require hydrology, herbicide drift/runoff modeling, and sedimentation analysis specific to Bear Creek and the Bear Creek Hatchery intake. 

Thank you for your careful consideration of the environmental, economic, and equity impacts of this project. 

Sincerely, 

Spencer Miller 

ADDENDUM – CITATIONS / EVIDENCE 

Herbicide Use in Transmission ROWs 

• Utilities widely use herbicides in transmission vegetation management; >75% of surveyed utilities apply herbicides on ROWs. [efis.psc.mo.gov] 

• Utility specifications demonstrate formal procedures for stump, basal, and foliar herbicide treatments in transmission corridors. [pubs.ext.vt.edu] 

• Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM), including herbicides, is the industry standard for transmission ROWs to maintain “tree-resistant” plant communities. 

PJM / MARL Drivers 

• PJM approved ~$5B in grid upgrades to support up to 7,500 MW of new data centers and >11,000 MW of retirements. [michigan.gov] 

• MARL described as a 500-kV regional corridor, not a local distribution reliability project. [epa.gov] 

Bear Creek Hatchery & Watershed 

• The hatchery draws water directly from the main channel of Bear Creek; stream-fed facilities are sensitive to sediment and water-quality fluctuations. [nrcs.usda.gov] 

Riparian Buffer Effectiveness 

• Studies report high pollutant retention: up to 97% sediment, 85% nitrogen, 84% phosphorus; meta-analysis shows ~54.5% phosphorus removal. [mapqa.next…energy.com], [stopmarlvirginia.com] 

• EPA emphasizes that vegetation loss and soil disturbance degrade buffer function. [stopmarlvirginia.com] 

Access Roads & Disturbance 

• Transmission construction typically requires 12–20 ft access roads with 40 ft working width for heavy equipment. [gain.inl.gov] 

Property Value Impacts 

• Rural properties within 0–500 ft of 500-kV lines experience ~16.3% value reduction; 501–1,000 ft ~13.9%; riparian habitat increases value. [nrc.gov] 

Data Center Load & Virginia’s Reliance on Imports 

• Conservation and energy-planning organizations confirm Northern Virginia data centers are driving unprecedented grid expansion. [jstor.org], [hebronnh.gov] 

Advanced Nuclear Alternatives 

• Dominion and Amazon are exploring SMRs for data-center baseload in Virginia. [conservancy.umn.edu] 

• NRC confirms readiness to license microreactors under existing frameworks. [federalregister.gov] 

• DOE microreactor descriptions: small, transportable, MW-scale, emerging by late 2020s. [open.library.ubc.ca] 

More photos of Bear Creek courtesy of Spencer Miller