Boat ramps are the gateway to the Chesapeake Bay for hundreds of thousands of Marylanders.
So when the only public ramp south of Annapolis in Anne Arundel County closed three days before the biggest boating weekend of the year, people noticed.
“The math just doesn’t work,” said County Councilwoman Shannon Leadbetter, who represents the community. “It stinks.”
Here’s how the math doesn’t work.
In 2016, the county signed a 30-year lease with the owner of a patch of waterfront pavement called Discovery Village in Shady Side. It agreed to pay $154,000 a year and cover repairs.
Two years later, it built a $1.4 million ramp — adding up to $6 million by the end of the lease.
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Park rangers counted 100 boaters in a single month using it, compared with thousands at other public ramps. The council decided that was too expensive and pulled the plug July 1, and even Leadbetter had to agree.
“We can do better for the people of south county,” she said.
Others say closer to 500 boaters use the ramp each month, and the decision caused hard feelings.
“That’s bullshit,” John Callewaert said of the county’s count.
He watches the ramp from his Eastport Spar & Rigging workshop at the marina: “You can see 100 boats in a weekend, coming back and forth, back and forth.”
Boat ramps are the path to middle-class freedom on the Chesapeake Bay.
If you can’t afford that waterfront home or marina slip rent, but can swing payments on a boat loan, boat ramps are your passport. You can fish for rock or cruise for lunch if can you roll a trailer down a ramp into the water.
There are hundreds of ramps around the Chesapeake Bay, and many are public. Five remain in Anne Arundel, there are three in Baltimore, eight in Baltimore County and 10 in Queen Anne’s County.
There are more in Ocean City if that’s your playground.
The point is to make public access easy, if not free, and creating this network took time and taxpayer money.
I’ve lived around them all my life. There was one on the street where I grew up, and there’s one at the end of my street today.
Summer mornings can be a symphony of engine percussion, loose safety chains ringing prettily along the pavement and occasional curses.
“I can be here in half an hour,” Billy Jerome of Beltsville said while prepping his boat at Sandy Point State Park.
He and his wife Jeanine pulled up in a white Ford Super Duty pickup, towing a Sea Fox center console. Together, they executed a perfect truck-and-trailer pirouette, cutting a half-circle and then gliding down one of 22 lanes sloping into the water just off the bay.
She tied off on the finger pier while he pulled into one of 90 parking spaces. It’s the state’s most popular public boat ramp.
Boat ramps are more than just fun — they’re an economic gift.
A few commercial crabbers used the ramp at Discovery Village. Now they’ll have to weigh various fees at other private marinas or consider the cost of gas to public ramps in Chesapeake Beach or Annapolis.
When it comes to boat ramps, close is better.
“It’s close to our house and close to where we crab,” Ron Reinhardt said Thursday at Truxtun Park in Annapolis.
He and his trotline partner, Chris Moore, motor to Carr’s Creek to catch enough crabs to sell to friends and connections.
Just a little side money for two retired UPS guys from Severna Park, and they pay the daily $10 fee for nonresidents on an app.
“It’s a little glitchy in the morning,” said Moore, holding up his phone aboard their Carolina Skiff. “It won’t take payment in the morning, but then it goes through at night.”
Public access has been a goal over four administrations in Anne Arundel.
County Executive Steve Schuh leased Discovery Village in 2016 from owner Adam Hewison, promising more no-frills sites. But it cost twice as much as planned.
In a county with 14,000 registered boats on trailers, only the ramp on Solleys Cove in Glen Burnie has been added since then.
County Executive Steuart Pittman has taken a different approach, making festivals at county waterfront parks his priority.
He continued the Discovery Village lease after Reliable Contracting bought the marina from owner Hewison in 2023 for $2.3 million — less than half the cost of the lease and ramp.
Reliable asked for a $1 million fix to the parking lot and a bulkhead, and a long-term rezoning plan would allow for a restaurant or dock bar.
The Department of Recreation and Parks says it came up with that 100 number with periodic counts, then passed it to the County Council in June as it was looking for cost savings.
Councilwoman Lisa Rodvien of Annapolis cast the key vote, first to keep the lease. Then she asked for a reconsideration and voted to kill it. The council voted 6-1 to sink it at the start of the fiscal year.
“I actually got a little bit more detail about how sort of fiscally irresponsible the lease was from the county’s point of view,” she said, “and it really just kind of put me in a place where I felt like I couldn’t support it.”
Boaters still could get a chance at the Discovery Village ramp. There’s are talks for a new agreement, but the solution might be a new lease with another marina on the creek.
Critics are building support for a protest in Annapolis.
“My husband docks his boat across the creek from Discovery Village,” said Julia Howes, president of the Southern Anne Arundel Chamber of Commerce. “We both have firsthand knowledge of people using the ramp.”
That’s how the math worked out. One less public boat ramp on the Chesapeake Bay.
This column has been updated to include the correct date the Discovery Village public boat ramp was completed. It opened in 2018.
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