The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 22

Page 2b Friday, November 2, 200 1 The Sun In Anne Arundel Maryland On The Bay Diamondback strikes at journalism deans, peges takeover plan a softer stream hank Creating fearing access to the water; but he says that "clearly there's a huge disconnect, culturally, between the different communities along the creek. What makes perfect sense to some of us is Just 180 degrees from others' point of view." Residents around College Creek have gotten used to using St. John's bulkhead as a crabbing spot. To continue providing crabbing access, the marsh restoration will Include a series of large stepping stones placed among the vegetation. With all Its complications and costs, the trend toward a softer tidal edge is the right one.

Now It's time for the Naval Academy, which has hardened most of the lower creek shore, to follow the St. John's example. Creek, whose drainage begins around West Street and Taylor Avenue and includes polluting storm-water runoff from the Naval Academy's stadium and parking lot. Another marsh has been restored this year where the creek's headwaters border Annapolis's Clay Street community, a largely black neighborhood. As recently as the 1960s, black oystermen operated out of these headwaters, traveling downstream to the Severn River and the bay.

"In their heyday, there were probably 30 boats working out of there," says Vincent O. Leggett, president of the Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation. Linhard says a small oyster bar surviving in the mouth of College Creek was found recently, and more than 2,500 bushels of shell and seed (small oysters) have been placed there to revive it. This is more for habitat restoration than oyster production. Watermen's boats can't get down College Creek anymore.

Newer bridges are too low to admit any- thing but a skiff or paddle craft. Then there are the realities of restoring an urban creek. Plans for a rowing club and for small boat access around the headwaters of College Creek have raised more concerns than approval from the Clay Street community. Residents, many of whom live in public housing, fear a "backdoor plan to move them out" by gentri-fying the creek, says Kirby McKin-ney, who grew up there and directs a local community center. Linhard say there's an irony in a former watermen's community overbid.

"I take these threats to The Diamondback's independence as a serious violation of the very basic tenets of Journalism," Schuler wrote. "The campus should take them as an insult to its collective intelligence and as a sign that Its own intellectual independence is In jeopardy." Last night, Kunkel rejected Schiller's charges as "paranoid" and "spiteful and laced with mistakes," saying the Journalism school has no interest In running The Diamondback. The school only wants to see the paper improve as a training ground for aspiring reporters, he said. "They're trying to say the college is trying to take control, and that's Just not true," Kunkel said. "It's not what we're about." The Oct.

19 meeting occurred two weeks after a Sun article detailing the internal debate over The Diamondback's finances and management. The paper has accumulated a $4 million surplus and in April approved a salary for Its non-student manager that by some estimates could have earned him $300,000 a year. It has since revised the salary. Maryland Media board members and Kunkel expressed hope that their differences could be resolved, but said relations are at a low point. Judgment against UM medical I If! ''I system voided Jamal, who had a history of respiratory illness, died March 16, 1996.

His mother and grandmother, of West Baltimore, claimed that the hospital was negligent because It did not admit Jamal after he was taken by ambulance from a doctor's office to the emergency room for treatment of respiratory trouble. He was treated and sent home. The next morning, his mother, Markieta, could not wake him, and he was returned to the hospital. The family's medical experts said Jamal probably died because mucus clogged his lungs, leading to heart arrhythmia. The hospital's lawyers argued at trial that Jamal died because he had ingested something toxic at home after leaving emergency care.

But the Court of Special Appeals said the trial Judge was correct to bar testimony from a paramedic who tried to revive Jamal and said she smelled a chemical odor on the boy's breath. The medical examiner said Jamal died of cardiac arrhythmia. Family of dead child may pursue an appeal By Andrea F. Sieqel SUN STAFF Lawyers for University of Maryland Medical System Corp. say they are glad a judgment against the medical network has been overturned, but attorneys for the family of a dead toddler said yesr terday that they hope to challenge the Court of Special Appeals' ruling to the state's top court, i A three-judge panel of the Court of Special Appeals ruled Wednesday that the jury was Improperly Instructed on the law during a two-week trial last year in Baltimore, and it ordered the case returned to Baltimore for retrial.

It also upheld the state's cap on non-economic damages, which reduced the $3.5 million jury award to the mother of 2-year-old Jamal Malory to $515,000, and erased a $200,000 award to the boy's grandmother as the representative of the child's es ft. Restoration: a st. John's College project to replace hard buVdieads on College Creek with natural marsh is shoving the wag for others. BjTomHorton SUN STAFF INNOWS SWIRL and crickets chirp amid the fecund dishabille of bayberry and hibiscus, cattails and spartina grasses, all gone to seed and collapsing back into the mud of the creek shore as autumn advances. It's the merest patch of freshwater marsh, about 85 feet long by 30 feet wide, infinitesimal amid the Chesapeake Bay's thousands of miles of tidal shoreline.

Still, its creation made lots of people nervous in 1998, when St. John's College dismantled a bit of its tidy, walled, or bulkheaded, shoreline along College Creek In Annapolis, and let natural vegetation flourish for the first time in half a century. Even the state's Department of Natural Resources was at first loath to go completely natural, recalls Steve Linhard, assistant treasurer at St. John's and the guiding force behind the pilot project to soften College Creek's hard edge. "It has proven so successful state officials bringpeople here to use this as a demonstration and teaching tool," Linhard says.

"We even have our own resident musk-rat." It is a tribute to Linhard and St. John's, and important for the bay that they are moving ahead with plans to remove the remaining 800 feet of sheer bulkhead between Rowe Boulevard and King George Street. They intend to replace it with the superior natural habitat of a tidal marsh. It's a trend that needs to accelerate baywide, to counter the "hardening" of the tidal shoreline as waterfront owners armor ever more miles to counter erosion. Virginia estimates more than 500 miles of its tidal shoreline have been hardened.

In the last decade, the rate of hardening has averaged 15 miles a year (some is on the Atlantic side, but most is on the Chesapeake). The only good news is that "riprap," the placement of stone along shorelines, is about three times as common as sheer walls, or bulkheads. The former provides somewhat better habitat as marine organ-Isms use the niches provided by the irregular rocks of the riprap. In Maryland, we have been hardening about 20 miles a year during the last five years, the great bulk of it in riprap as opposed to bulkheading (the state discourages the latter by making permits harder to get). The "soft" alternative, which receives some financial incentive from state and federal funds, accounts In Maryland for only a few miles of shoreline ayear.

While the best soft alternative, planting marshes, won't work on shore fronts that are deep or have high wave energy, measures like stone breakwaters placed just offshore are underutilized. These can break the erosive force of waves without destroying the natural habitats of the shoreline and adjacent shallows, as riprap and bulkheads do. The College Creek project shows the value of not hardening shoreline in the first place, as St. John's did in the 1950s to level and extend Its athletic fields. The cost to "resoften" the first patch, at the foot of the King George Street bridge, ran more than $500 a foot, money that came from the Chesapeake Bay Trust, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the state Department of Natural sources and Ducks Unlimited.

The projected removal of the other 800 feet will cost about $400,000. The good news is that the project is sparking renewed Interest in a wider plan to enhance College INFO CENTER SuiiDial Directory Talk Back 1000 1800 Dialing Directions Using a touch-tone phone, call one of the SunOial phone numbers and enter the four-digit code of the category you wish to access. Additional SunDUtl categories are listed throughout the paper ibvery Purchase Makes A UM officials' advice to hire adviser for paper caUed 'violation 'insult' By Alec MacGillib UN STAFF COLLEGE PARK A heated internal dispute over the finances and future of the University of Maryland campus newspaper, The Diamondback, erupted yesterday Into a war of words between the paper and the leadership of the UM Journalism School, played out oiiTfte Diamondback's front page. In a banner editorial headlined "Intimidation won't quash Independence," Jonathan Schuler, the papef editor, accused the dean and associate dean of the journalism school, Thomas Eunkel and Chris Callahan, of trying to take control of the newspaper, which ha? been independent since 1971. 'r The editorial and an accompanying article described a meeting Oct; 19 between the two deans and members of the board of Maryland Media the nonprofit organization that oversees the paper.

C'M the meeting, Kunkel and Callahan voiced concerns about the paper's management and suggested, among other things, that it hire a professional editorial adviser to help In its newsroom. In his editorial and In an Interview last night, Schuler said the deans' statements amounted to a take- Lottery Maryland Day Daily 393 Pick 4 1770 NightDaily 200 Plck4 4754 Lotto, Oct. 31 042830314248 Cashin Hand, Nov. 1 02041014242830 There was no winning ticket for Wednesday's Lotto drawing, worth an estimated $5.3 million. Twelve tickets matched five of six num-bgrs" winning 522 matched four numbers, winning $40.

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The 36-page decision was a blow to the Malory family and its lawyers, said Henry E. Dugan one of four attorneys for the family. "When they are reversed with a cap, the result Is doubly damaging," Dugan said, noting the expense of a second trial and the limit on non-economic damages. The court rejected the family's contention that the statutory cap on non-economic damages pain, suffering and the like Is unconstitutional because it hits women and minorities especially hard because they are less likely to have big Income losses for which they can seek damages. That limits their overall ability to recover damages, Dugan said.

Dugan said he expects to ask the Court of Appeals to hear a challenge to the intermediate appellate court's ruling. AMERICAN STRESS MATCHING PARTNER mb Childrens Center jzc Ml T' i 1 a Better I you your often makes Use Your American Express Card in the Baltimore Area and Support Johns Hopkins Children's Center. After violating airspace, pilot forced to land By Laura Sullivan SUN STAFF A single-engine plane rented in New Jersey was forced to land at Baltimore-Washington International Airport yesterday morning after airport officials said it violated the airspace of an undisclosed area. The pilot was taken Into custody for Immigration and Naturalization Service violations, FBI om-cials said. FBI agents, who were on the scene when the plane landed, did not bring criminal charges against the pilot.

FBI spokesman Peter A. Gulotta said the agency does not believe the incident was related to terrorist activity. It is unclear whether the plane was forced down by military aircraft or radioed to land, when It arrived at the airport late yesterday morning. "The plane entered into airspace that it was not allowed to be in," said Melanie Miller, a BWI spokeswoman. "Since the September attacks, we have been on heightened security.

The Federal Aviation Administration and INS dealt with it." This is the second time in two days a plane was forced to land at a nearby airport. Student pilot Ken Stinson, flanked by two F-16s, was forced to land at Carroll County Regional Airport on Wednesday, after he accidentally flew over the presidential retreat at Camp David. The FBI, FAA and other law enforcement authorities questioned the 43-year-old man for 3 hours before releasing him. "This stuff Is going on at airports every day now," because of a heightened state of alert, Gulotta said. The pilot, who has not been identified, rented the plane from the Flying Airport and Resort in Medford, N.J.

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