Legacy of Largesse at the End of the Line
Longtime Md. Speaker Returns Home to Bitterness and Blight

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 2003; Page B01
 

Casper R. Taylor Jr. grew up in the mountain town of Clarysville, ensconced in a 20-room antebellum inn with the family restaurant downstairs. Most nights, he would venture out to greet a coal miner who lived nearby as he returned home, unrecognizably filthy and coughing from the dust, for a tepid bath in a kitchen washtub.

For the boy who would become speaker of the Maryland House, it was a lasting lesson in the hardship that isolates his region. "We were a forgotten people," he remembered thinking. "And it's not fair."

Once in the legislature, the Allegany County Democrat tried to bridge the gap between wealth and want in the nation's third-richest state. He charmed, shamed and harangued Maryland into funneling hundreds of millions of public dollars through Allegany County's narrow mountain passes, building highways and runways, resorts and industrial parks, in hopes of luring prosperity westward.

His defeat in November -- by a mere 72 votes -- ended one of the longest, most ambitious and arguably most controversial efforts to assist Appalachian Maryland in state history. Now, as the state struggles to plug a record budget gap, it's clear there won't be another such windfall soon.

"Sometimes we depend on the state to solve all of our problems," said Del. Leroy E. Myers Jr., the Republican who replaced Taylor. "It was always Mr. Taylor, riding on his white horse, coming to the rescue. If anybody is to blame for the funding problem, he is."

Taylor said such opinions "don't deserve a comment." These days, the former power broker chairs the legislative affairs committee of the Allegany County Chamber of Commerce. He remains a believer. "We can't overcome our economically stressed conditions by ourselves," he told fellow committee members. Without state help, "we're going to spend generations waiting our turn."

In the late 1800s, Cumberland was Maryland's "Queen City," a soot-stained boomtown whose strategic mountain pass made it an important gateway to the west. From the 1920s on, the region's thousands of unskilled workers depended on mining, transport and a handful of big tire and chemical factories.

Fortune smiles rarely on Appalachian children, and Taylor made the most of it. In a region where many people never completed high school, he received a degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame, married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Lenore "Polly" Young, and took over his father's restaurant in Cumberland.

By the time Taylor was elected District 1C delegate in 1974, Allegany's economy had entered a death spiral. Globalization and automation were forcing the mines and plants out, eventually displacing about a quarter of the labor force. The county had third-world sanitation, inadequate health care and few major roads.

"Every time I'd go downstate, I'd see what we didn't have," Taylor recalled. "And we were laughed at, which always teed me off."

So Taylor organized tours of his troubled region, bringing the powerful nose to nose with its needs.

"He made everybody go out there, look around, smell, feel and taste what he was talking about," said Timothy F. Maloney, a former Prince George's County delegate who led the capital budget subcommittee during Taylor's tenure.

"He made Allegany County everyone's second home, and that was part of his genius."

After a banker told him that mid-Atlantic investment looks north and south, not west, Taylor decided: "I've got to break the ice by creating something that will attract business."

To do that, Taylor helped send about $600 million in state and federal money "back home." The money built Interstate 68 and other highways, two prisons and a coal-fired electrical generator. Frostburg State University grew from a teachers' college to a full-scale university. State-supported daily flights shuttled potential investors to Cumberland, Baltimore and Hagerstown.

In the early 1990s, Taylor lured the Washington Redskins football team to the Frostburg campus for training camp, bringing fans in on a scenic train with its engine painted in the team's colors. Taylor secured about $120 million in state and federal funds for Canal Place Heritage Area, a transportation-themed tourist complex.

Soon after Taylor became speaker in 1994, he pulled off a controversial plan to build -- on state parkland -- Rocky Gap Lodge and Golf Resort, a 218-room hotel and Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. It was completed in 1998 with $51 million in state grants, loans and high-yield, tax-exempt bonds.

In 1998, Taylor's deal-making drew scrutiny from an ethics panel, which investigated his backing of a state land deal and a business bailout that benefited a crony. He was cleared.

Several of Taylor's projects failed to bring the business he'd envisioned. The Cumberland flights average two passengers in each 19-seat plane. After seven years, Canal Place still receives more than half its operating budget from the state. Rocky Gap was supposed to be profitable this year; instead, low occupancy rates recently forced the lodge to suspend interest payments to bondholders.

"This is a wonderful project . . . but it needs to sell itself," said Hans F. Mayer, executive director of the Maryland Economic Development Corp., the nonprofit entity that runs Rocky Gap. "Whether or not [Taylor is the speaker] isn't going to make the difference."

While Taylor's efforts left Allegany less isolated, they failed to lift the region out of poverty. Unemployment has come out of double digits but is still twice the U.S. average; personal income is half. The region's rates of infant mortality and teenage pregnancy are among the highest in the state.

"This is a region with very deep needs," said D. Bruce Poole, a Hagerstown lawyer and former Democratic state lawmaker. "But pouring buckets of public money into a gaping hole until it starts to level off was a plan born of desperation."

In 2001, Taylor was approached about becoming state treasurer but didn't want the job because "that wasn't where my talents were," he said. He mulled a bid for governor last year but decided that his record wouldn't appeal statewide. In November, as Western Maryland voters turned out to help elect the state's first Republican governor in more than 30 years, Taylor lost to Myers, a contractor and political unknown. Myers, 51, said he plans to focus on improving the county's north-south road access, supporting small businesses and helping the area kick the public cash habit.

This year's legislative session, the first without Taylor, saw deep cuts in his pet projects. Canal Place was told to find future operating money elsewhere. The airport shuttle's subsidy was canceled, probably grounding the planes. The potential for a county racetrack and 500 more jobs brought Taylor back to Annapolis as an unpaid lobbyist, only to see a proposal to legalize slot machines defeated.

As the session limped to a close last month, the legislature paused in the bloodletting to pay Taylor a tribute, voting to name a planned house office building for him.

At lunch in a Cumberland diner, Taylor tucked into a chicken salad sandwich and discussed his future. He lectures at schools, attends the Chamber of Commerce meetings and is starting a consulting business. "I'm trying to find an avenue to keep helping," he said.

Taylor once dreamed of refurbishing the Clarysville Inn his father ran years ago.

But the Clarysville he knew no longer exists. It was bypassed by one highway project, then another, its winding creek moved to accommodate the asphalt. Today, all that remains is a dead-end street, headed by the rubble of the inn, which burned down several years ago.

In the Fire Hall tavern there, locals blast the town's favorite son.

"The only thing he brought in here was a couple of low-paying jobs," Dick Atkinson, 57, of Frostburg, said as he nursed a beer. "There's nothing else."
 
 

© 2003 The Washington Post Company