Public's Say in Planning Widens
Montgomery Vote Tightens Approval Process at Agency

By Tim Craig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 1, 2006

The Montgomery County Council voted yesterday to give the public greater access to the planning process and strip mid-level planners of their power to make changes to construction projects that had been previously approved by the Planning Board.

The vote reflected an effort to restore the reputation of the planning agency -- formally called the Department of Park and Planning -- which the council controls, after the discovery of serious building violations at the 1,300-home Clarksburg Town Center in northern Montgomery.

But the council delayed action on a major proposed reform that would have shifted some of the planning agency's building inspection authority to the Department of Permitting Services, which County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) controls.

Instead of voting on the matter, the council instructed the leaders of the planning and permitting agencies to come to their own agreement about how best to inspect new development projects.

"I think our goal has been very simple: to identify the systemic problems and fix them, and to restore confidence in our land-use planning and enforcement," said council member Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large), who chairs the council's land-use committee. "We must make sure there are no more Clarksburgs."

The changes mean residents will get a chance to review developers' plans even before the Planning Board begins deciding whether to approve a new project. And once a project is approved, the Planning Board -- not its staff -- will have to sign off on any changes, even for such minor things as adding a row of benches or flowers to a pocket of green space.

The leaders of the county planning agency supported most of the council's reforms. But they warned that the development approval process could slow to a crawl because all changes must now go before the Planning Board, whose decisions can be appealed by the public.

"It will take longer. It will stop the process," said Faroll Hamer, the acting planning director.

But civic activists say the council's decision is a major step toward restoring public confidence in the county's development review policies.

"Now the public can be more confident that projects will be built as approved by the Planning Board," said Jim Humphrey, chairman of the Montgomery County Civic Federation's land-use committee.

At Clarksburg Town Center, a group of residents discovered last year that hundreds of homes were built too tall and close to the street and that promised amenities never appeared. The residents, as well as county and outside investigators, said that the county's development review system was broken.

The planning agency had allowed mid-level staffers to make changes to approved Clarksburg plans without input from the public.

The planning agency also suffered from sloppy record keeping, poor management and a culture that was hostile to residents, according to a November report by the council's Office of Legislative Oversight.

The planning agency had neither the staff nor the procedures to adequately monitor developers to make sure they were abiding by approved plans, according to the report.

The controversy threatened to undermine Montgomery's reputation for diligent planning. It also posed a potential political problem for council members seeking reelection this year and for Duncan, who is running for governor.

Yesterday, some council members appeared mindful of the political environment, rebuffing the concerns of planning leaders in favor of those expressed by civic activists.

"We are in an atmosphere of intense mistrust, which is being aggravated by self-appointed citizen leaders," Council President George L. Leventhal (D-At Large) told Hamer. "I am very reluctant to give ammunition to the permanent critics of this process. . . . There are some fights not worth having."

The council voted unanimously yesterday to require developers to explain any future proposed project with neighbors even before planners begin considering whether to approve it.

The change, supported by Planning Board Chairman Derick Berlage, comes in response to residents' complaints that they often do not know about a proposed project until it's too late to aggressively fight it.

The council also voted unanimously to strengthen the requirements for what must be on a site plan, the legally binding document that the Planning Board uses to decide whether to approve a project. The council says the plans must now include all the details of a project.