Perryman's Years-Long Fight Against Development Now Turns To A Proposed Power Plant

By Christine Condon, Maryland Matters

January 19, 2026

Since moving to her home in Harford County’s Perryman neighborhood in 2017, Tamie Wainwright has replaced her mailbox three times, after it was destroyed by traffic crashes.

She watches tractor-trailers rush past at all hours of the day, heading toward nearby warehouses for companies like Wayfair and Sephora.

“It’s 24/7,” said Wainwright, a lifelong county resident.

And she’s seen pileups quickly trap traffic in her suburban neighborhood, which has only a few exits because it is bounded on one side by the Bush River and on the other by the sprawling military base at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

“Our roads can’t handle it. My yard can’t handle it anymore,” Wainwright said.

It’s one reason a group of residents, called 3P Protect Perryman Peninsula, formed a public campaign to stop additional warehouse developments, promote infrastructure improvements and protect the local environment.

Residents of Harford County’s Perryman community, frustrated by truck traffic to nearby warehouses, now worry about a new natural gas-fired power plant proposed for the area. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

Now, they’re facing a new potential foe.

In November, Constellation Energy unveiled plans for a new natural gas-fired power plant in Perryman, on the same site as an existing plant that the company runs.

It’s not clear the proposal will advance. For one thing, Constellation has said that routing a new gas pipeline to the site could cost some $800 million, and the company is seeking financial help from an already cash-strapped state government. But the idea has stirred frustration in a small community already beset by industrial activity.

“For me, it was shock,” said Stacy Stone, who said her family has lived in the community for the last 50 years. “It was just shock that they would have such disrespect for our community after we’ve been vocal all this time.”

Constellation spokesman Paul Adams said the company “has a long history of operating safely and responsibly at our Perryman Generating Station in Aberdeen, Md., and that includes regularly engaging with community leaders and other stakeholders.”

“Nothing about that will change as we potentially develop additional natural gas and battery storage generating capacity at that location,” Adams wrote.

Constellation’s proposal came under a new state law that opened a “fast-track” permitting process for new energy generation in Maryland, a response to high electric bills.

The Public Service Commission determined last month that the company’s proposals — a smaller 150-megawatt plant or a larger 564-megawatt facility — had met all of the legislature’s requirements to move through the fast-track, which would grant them a permit decision within 295 days after they file a complete application. That has yet to be filed.

Constellation’s proposal for 800 megawatts of battery storage on the Perryman site did not meet the fast-track requirements, but the company could still pursue it.

The state’s rush to bolster new power infrastructure could come into conflict with its own ambitious climate change mandates, which give Maryland until 2031 to reduce its globe-warming emissions 60% from 2006 levels. Achieving those reductions already presents a challenge. Building a new emissions-generating power plant would essentially render it impossible.

Meanwhile, residents worry about what a new power plant could mean for their health, the health of the river and the infrastructure of a neighborhood that they already consider overburdened by industry. They also worry that their concerns could fall by the wayside amid the expedited process.

“I’m not at all opposed to growth,” resident Glenn Gillis said. “You’ve got to do it with a sense of balance. And what we’ve seen here has been that the balance has been completely out of sync.”

‘They don’t know until it slaps them in the face’

In many ways, Perryman is a place where the urban and rural collide.

The drive in from bustling Route 40 passes a truck stop and a warehouse, but also grassy fields and the folksy Perryman Grocery — advertising cold cut sandwiches, beer and liquor.

To get to Perryman Grocery, the only grocery within walking distance, residents need to walk along busy, two-lane Perryman Road, which has no sidewalks to protect them. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

To Glenn Dudderar, a 25-year neighborhood, that spot has come to represent the ways Perryman’s infrastructure isn’t keeping up with its rapid development into a Harford County shipping hub.

As cars, trucks and tractor trailers whizz past on two-lane Perryman Road, Dudderar constantly notices pedestrians walking toward Perryman Grocery — the only shop within walking distance — without sidewalks or crosswalks to protect them.

As a former vice president of the Perryman Community Association, Dudderar says he pushed the county to build sidewalks along Perryman Road beginning in the early 2000s. Only recently has the idea seemed to gain momentum, though no construction has begun.

“We were going to bring trucks through that area,” Dudderar said. “And now we’re talking about a generation plant. We still haven’t solved the sidewalk problem.”

The neighborhood includes a mixture of riverfront homes small and large, but also a mobile home community and a series of squat three-story apartment buildings that include some low-income residents receiving government assistance.

“You have some very affluent people that live on the water there, but then you have some people that are living day-to-day,” said Del. Andre V. Johnson Jr. (D- Harford) who represents the area. “They’re working. They don’t know what’s really happening as far as these — whether it’s the Constellation [proposal], or whether it’s these warehouses — they don’t know until it slaps them in the face.”

Johnson says he isn’t necessarily opposed to the idea of another power plant in Perryman, but believes that residents ought to have plenty of say — starting with a public meeting in the community to air their concerns.

Constellation’s site, directly across the railroad tracks from many homes in Perryman, already includes a five-unit, 404-megawatt electric generation facility. Four of the units are oil-fueled combustion turbines, which can start quickly to supply the grid during times of peak demand. The fifth, added in 1995, is fueled by natural gas.

The Maryland Department of the Environment considers the area both overburdened by pollution and underserved, with high percentages of low-income, nonwhite and non-English-speaking individuals. The Perryman Census tract got an “environmental justice” score of 81.8 out of 100, placing it among the most-burdened tracts in the state.

Johnson argues that efforts to maintain agricultural lands in the northern portion of Harford County, while still encouraging development, has come at a cost to his more suburban district.

Constellation Energy already operates a power plant with units powered by oil and natural gas on the site where it wants to add a new natural gas-fired power plant. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

“In the upper end of the county, which they would consider to be God’s country, if they don’t want something, like solar or building a new gas plant … they’ll just shove it down into my district,” Johnson said. “And I don’t think that that’s right for my constituents.”

A resistance is born

Back in 2021, Perryman resident Leigh Maddox only found out about the warehouse proposal because of a small advertisement buried in a newspaper.

Developers aimed to transform the corn fields near the neighborhood entrance into a sprawling freight terminal, complete with warehouses and thousands of parking spaces for cars and tractor-trailers.

Perhaps best known for its locally canned white “shoe-peg” corn, Mitchell Farm had been operating since the 1800s. Wainwright can trace her family history back to ancestors who were enslaved on the farm.

For a community already surrounded by warehouses, train tracks and industrial sites, the proposal for the Mitchell site was a step too far.

“That galvanized us,” Gillis said.

In early 2022, residents formed 3P and began appearing in force at public meetings to oppose the project. Later, they would even file suit against the developers.

And they may have won that battle. In 2023, the Harford County Council amended zoning rules so that only 250,000 square feet of warehouse space could go on the property, a dramatic reduction from the 5 million square feet originally planned.

The next battlefront

The two plants proposed by Constellation would each generate about 1,000 pounds of globe-warming carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, according to the company’s proposals.

But burning fossil fuels also means elevated concentrations of ground-level ozone and fine particulate matter, which can aggravate heart and lung disease, and lead to heart attacks, asthma attacks and strokes.

Perryman resident Glenn Gillis shows a map of the community during a Jan. 5 meeting in his home with other Perryman residents. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

The proposals from Constellation also come as President Donald Trump’s (R) administration is proposing to roll back some air pollution rules for power plants.

“If this gets built at its current state of environmental protections, it appears more conscious to the community members, right? But I don’t think that that will necessarily stick around,” said Debbie Patton, a Perryman homeowner for the last 15 years. “That concerns me for my own personal health, for all of my neighbors’ health and all of the wildlife in this area.”

All the while, some experts aren’t convinced that new power generation even needs to be built in Maryland, including David Lapp, Maryland’s people’s counsel, who is charged with representing utility ratepayers.

Lapp said that a transmission line currently under construction by Baltimore Gas & Electric to address the retirement of the Brandon Shores and Wagner power plants in Anne Arundel County will solve congestion problems that forced Baltimore-area residents to pay more for power than others on the same electric grid.

“To build a power plant to serve the same purpose would be forcing ratepayers to double-pay for the same reliability benefit” Lapp said. “We can benefit from the generation that is built in the place where it is cheapest to build that generation, which may not be Maryland.”

That may be in Pennsylvania, home to substantial stores of natural gas, Lapp says.

It’s the prospect of pipeline construction, possibly from Pennsylvania, that truly worries Gunpowder Riverkeeper Theaux Le Gardeur, who also focuses on Perryman’s Bush River.

“The footprint of the gas plant is not the issue,” he said. “The issue is how the gas plant is fed.”

To build a pipeline, construction crews would have to clear foliage along the route. Even with some replanting, mature trees and other plant life would be lost, critical bulwarks against rushing rainwater that carries all the pollutants of human development, from lawn fertilizers to car exhaust fumes.

Perryman residents, already concerned by truck traffic to an increasing number of warehouses in the community, are frustrated about a new natural gas-fired power plant proposed for Perryman. (Photo by Christine Condon/Maryland Matters)

“The first thing that goes are the trees, and then the scrub wetlands go, and then we go back to, like, grass,” Le Gardeur said. “We’re losing that idea of forest and wetlands in providing natural stormwater controls.”

Controlling urban and suburban stormwater is among the greatest challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay. Stormwater pollution has increased since bay restoration efforts started in 1985, while pollution from other major sources, such as farm fields and sewage treatment plants, has declined.

Adams, of Constellation, said that “environmental and economic justice” is a “bedrock principle” for the company.

“Any new gas generation at our Perryman site would require significant new gas pipeline expansion. As Maryland policymakers consider proposals for new gas generation and related infrastructure, we encourage community members to take part in that conversation,” Adams wrote.

As he sat at his neighbor’s kitchen table among other community leaders during a recent meeting, Greg LaCour couldn’t help but gaze out the window toward the Bush River, which was dappled with ice.

And then, he saw them. A pair of bald eagles, soaring through the gray January sky. He interrupted the meeting to point them out.

“They’ve got a young one, and right now they’re teaching the young one how to fish,” LaCour said.

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “That’s part of our community.”