I was in the room when two guys from Connecticut first uttered a name now synonymous with greed, environmental activism and NIMBYs on the march.

Crystal Spring.

Such a pretty name. Ships sailing up the Chesapeake Bay would pull into the South River and stop for fresh water on the trip into Baltimore. Or so the story goes.

In 2010, Marshall Breines and Jim Eagan came to the newspaper where I worked and rolled out plans for a new community built on the appeal of Annapolis as a place to grow old. They called it Crystal Spring.

Some see the 15 years of hearings and the millions spent on legal fees and construction delays that followed as a cautionary tale of how things should not work.

“I do think that the powers that be at the city have come to realize that,” said Chill Hotchkiss, sales director for the project, now called The Village at Providence Point.

“It’s too easy for someone who wants to continue to fight.”

As this saga playing out on the city’s southern edge nears its end, maybe the fight over the last private forest in Maryland’s state capital is something different.

Perhaps it’s about finding a balance in the give and take of a city’s evolution.

Last month, the Maryland Court of Appeals issued an exhaustive, 67-page decision that should clear the way for construction to begin this fall at Forest Drive and Spa Road.

Writing for the unanimous court, Judge Rosalyn Tang said city planners correctly approved a slimmed-down project in 2022 and a Circuit Court judge rightly upheld it in 2024. The judge found that some of the arguments to block it are “misguided.”

Crab Creek Conservancy, the heart of remaining opposition, could surrender. Or it could try to go one more round.

G. Macy Nelson, attorney for the conservancy, waved off the idea that there’s nothing left to fight.

“That, my friend, is bullshit,” he said.

I drove into the lush tangle where The Village at Providence Point seems certain to rise over the next three years. It’s not a green cathedral. It’s land once farmed and then left to go feral.

Owner Janet Richardson’s plan 15 years ago was to sell her 176 acres on Crab Creek, tucked next to her horse training center, for a continuing care community of 350 apartments and duplexes, 130 town houses and a 75-room nursing home.

It would be run by National Lutheran Communities & Services. Breines and Eagan would develop it, profiting from an adjacent shopping center and hotel. They just needed a break from city forest conservation and stormwater runoff rules.

The forest is a crucial stormwater filter for the South River, one side said, lungs for the city. Traffic on Forest Drive would choke.

Think of the boost to property taxes, the other side countered, and the uplift for surrounding shopping centers and office buildings. Annapolis needs the jobs.

Opponents enlisted Gerald Winegrad, a retired state senator and author of the state’s first forest conservation law. They named their group “Stop Crystal Spring.”

“The thing that environmentalists are best about, bar none, is not positive change,” Winegrad said. “The best thing they’re good at is blocking stuff. ... And they use all of these laws. They use them in a very good, very strong, strong fashion.”

Years passed. Breines and his partners from Connecticut gave up. Winegrad complained he never expected to spend so much of his retirement on this.

In 2019, National Lutheran and Richardson agreed to a slimmed-down plan, one with 272 apartments, 30 cottages and a 48-room nursing home on 52 acres.

Trees removed would be replaced on 124 acres that Richardson would retain and conserve, with stormwater runoff addressed and a bird sanctuary established.

Richardson’s neighbors said no. They formed the conservancy, led by her next-door neighbor, Forrest Mays.

Winegrad went to his house and asked him to sign on.

“I said, Forrest, it makes sense; we’ll do this. And he goes, I’m not doing that. And I go, why? He said, because you — he points at me — are collaborating with the developer and their attorneys.

“And then you know what he did? He ran in his house and shut the door.”

Through rulings and appeals, 70% of the homes sold. It’s been three mayors since this started. The term continuing care went out of fashion, replaced by life plan community. Costs increased for future buyers, although not those locked in with deposits.

Not everyone had time to wait.

“My husband was not ill for long,” Patricia Shaffer said. “We expected to be able to move in, even with the delay. But he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was gone three weeks later.”

The April 24 appeals ruling seems final. The Supreme Court of Maryland takes about 15% of appeals.

Here at the end, 15 years later, you have to ask what this was all about.

It started as a desire to squeeze as many millions out of land too rare to let sit but not special enough to preserve. It is ending with one group of rich people using the courts to fight another group.

Early on, Rob Savidge walked Richardson’s forest and decided it was worth saving.

He ran for City Council in 2017, campaigning to change the forest conservation law. He passed a one-to-one standard for replacing trees used to approve Providence Point.

“Some of my colleagues overcompensate,” Savidge said. “They’re upset with the 15 years, and they’re trying to streamline the process.”

Future battles won’t be about forests. They will be about affordable housing and aging commercial buildings surrounded by parking lots. It will be about public transit.

If there is a lesson of Crystal Spring, or The Village at Providence Point, it is that Annapolis and communities like it can’t pull up the drawbridge and prevent all development. It makes things worse.

Instead, they should bargain for something fair in return. Something better.

“We need to start doing bigger things,” Savidge said.