of the ICC engineering and construction budget. In a letter to the editor of The Baltimore Sun, David Marks, a former official with the Maryland Department of Transportation, wrote that the SHA project team "...had the foresight to require substantial environmental improvements as part of the project, and they insisted on broad public input..." One component of the mitigation is the replacement of parkland taken for the ICC with new land. Replacement lands intended to compensate for these losses include a large parcel of land in the Boyds area of Montgomery County owned by the Eugene B. Casey Foundation. However, the trustees of the Casey Foundation did not agree to the purchase of this parcel, so the State Highway Administration acquired the land by condemnation and the matter was reported as resolved in June 2008. In July 2008, controversy was reported on a similar subject. A parcel of land near the intersection of MD 198 and Peach Orchard Road which had been condemned by the SHA in 1997 for possible use as the so-called Northern Alignment (Corridor 2) was conveyed to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission to compensate for parkland which will be taken by the ICC. The former owner, Winchester Homes, filed a lawsuit contending that the SHA must offer to sell this land back to Winchester, and in May 2008, Judge S. Michael Pincus of the Montgomery County Circuit Court ruled that "the SHA was contractually obligated to offer Winchester Homes the chance to buy back the property." It was further reported that the state filed an appeal in June 2008. In the February 2008 edition of the Successes in Stewardship newsletter, the Federal Highway Administration stated: Since environmental impacts were the major barrier to prior ICC planning efforts, the third EIS team redefined the project-development approach to explicitly include environmental stewardship as part of the project's stated purpose and need. In order to fulfill the ICC's stated purpose "to help restore the natural, human, and cultural environments in the project area from the adverse effects of past development," lead-agency staff used context-sensitive design approaches to minimize or altogether avoid adverse impacts to wetlands and streams in the development of project alternatives. At least one section of the ICC was re-routed from the master-planned route to reduce environmental impact, though the re-routing led to additional residences having to be condemned as a result. Eastern box turtles