I've got a story today about the February home sales numbers from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which show average prices dropping about 4 percent and sales down 33 percent from a year earlier in the Baltimore metro area. You can read the story HERE or see the statistics HERE. (I did mean to blog about it yesterday, but busy and ill was too much of a combination to overcome.)

With this housing-market backdrop in mind, you can understand why a developer might decide not to go ahead with plans for a new subdivision. But Chris Guy reports today that Snow Hill on the Eastern Shore so wants developer Mark Odachowski to build as proposed that it's "considering borrowing several million dollars" to build a sewage treatment plant and save Odachowski the upfront expense.

"My hope is that we're able to get a grant to cover about half the cost, borrow the rest and then the developer pays the town back," Mayor Stephen R. Mathews says of the new plan, details of which are being negotiated.

"If anybody thinks we're left holding the bag, they need to realize that it was ours to begin with," the mayor says. "We have to have a new sewage system ... to grow."

Snow Hill leaders want growth, much like Baltimore -- and unlike Baltimore's suburbs, where fights between residents and developers are much, much more common than cooperative deals.