Montgomery Candidates Shying Away From Growth
Silverman and Leggett Play Down Their Records and Cater to Voters' Opposition to Sprawl

By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 4, 2006

There was a time when growth was something politicians bragged about in Montgomery County.

They would point to the office towers sprouting along Interstate 270 and to the expensive homes popping up from Germantown to Silver Spring.

But today, voter concerns about traffic and school crowding have altered the political landscape, forcing the two leading candidates for county executive to play down their pro-growth records and to emphasize their ideas for containing sprawl.

Early in their campaigns for the Democratic nomination, council member Steven A. Silverman and former council member Isiah Leggett emphasized their differences in style. Silverman promised to be a decisive executive, and Leggett played up his image as a mediator.

With slightly more than three months to go before the September primary, the focus has shifted to issues. Leggett and Silverman are aggressively tapping a powerful vein of voter discontent over the pace of growth that came into focus with the discovery of building violations in Clarksburg, where homes were built too high and too close to the street.

"Somehow growth has become a dirty word in some people's minds," said Rockville resident Cheryl Kagan (D), a member of the state House of Delegates from 1995 to 2003.

Leggett has blamed county leaders for failing to manage growth, and he has promised to slow it so schools and road improvements can catch up. Leggett, who served on the council from 1986 to 2002, also said that he would limit contributions from developers to no more than 25 percent of his overall haul. He has criticized Silverman for what he calls his overdependence on developer dollars.

Silverman, elected in 1998, is trying to play down his staunchly pro-growth reputation and turn voters' attention to what he considers Leggett's development-friendly votes during 16 years on the council. In recent public forums and interviews, he has described himself as a "moderate" on growth and promised to spend more on roads and transit. And he has made the long-debated Purple Line -- a light-rail link between Bethesda and New Carrollton -- a major issue and accused Leggett of insufficient support.

"These guys are smart, and they read the temperature, and the temperature is to cool it a little bit," said Bruce Adams (D), a former council member who ran unsuccessfully for county executive in 1994.

The Montgomery race offers a stark contrast to the mayoral contest in the District, where education has emerged as the main issue as residents worry that bad schools will decrease property values. As more people move to Montgomery for its well-regarded schools, many residents are concerned with pulling up the drawbridge behind them to preserve their quality of life.

"We're at a critical point in Montgomery County where we have to say, 'Let's take a look and see whether we can afford the kind of development in the next 10 years that we have had in the last 10 years,' " said former county executive Sidney Kramer (D), who was elected in 1986.

Business leaders worry that politicians are responding to hysteria. They point out that Montgomery's population growth has been slower than that of other jurisdictions. From 2000 to 2005, the population increased 6.21 percent in Montgomery, compared with 50.66 percent in Loudoun County, according to census figures.

"We have people in this community who go beyond NIMBYism," said Richard Parsons, chairman of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce. "They want to get in everyone else's back yard. They're bananas, and that stands for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone."

In 1990, the slow-growth message played well for county executive candidate Neal Potter (D), who defeated pro-growth incumbent Kramer.

Four years later, Potter's slow-growth message no longer resounded in a community in recession. Voters wanted more jobs and revitalized neighborhoods, which Douglas M. Duncan (D) promised to deliver by aggressively promoting the county as pro-business.

The Clarksburg controversy exacerbated existing concerns about growth and fed criticism that Duncan and council members had let developers, many of them generous contributors to their political campaigns, run amok.

"The pendulum does swing back and forth," former council member Nancy Dacek (R) said, "and I don't think the pro-growthers are going to get a lot of help on that score."

In this environment, Leggett has sought to portray himself as a reasonable moderate on growth issues and Silverman as being in the pocket of developers. Silverman has responded by suggesting that their records are virtually identical. Leggett "is running away from his pro-growth voting record on the council," Silverman said in an interview.

Leggett disputed that. "You can make a case on an individual vote here or there, but I don't think anyone would rationally view me as ever in history being pro-growth," he said.

Leggett said he has been consistent. "This is not something that started recently for the campaign. This goes back 20 years," he said.

Yet some political observers say Leggett's rhetoric has changed.

"He is talking much more controlled, restrained growth than I've ever heard him talk about when he was on the council," said Gail Ewing, a former council member.

In 1999, Leggett joined Silverman in voting against the elimination of a policy known as "pay and go" that allowed developers to pay a fee and build projects even in areas under a growth moratorium. Also that year, the two voted against tightening rules for special exceptions to zoning laws because they felt the proposal was too broad.

And in 2001, both candidates voted against expanding an impact tax on new development to the entire county. They later voted for a weaker version of the tax.

In 2003, after Leggett left, Silverman led the charge to impose Maryland's highest taxes on development. But he also backed the elimination of "policy area review," which used formulas to determine whether certain communities can sustain new housing. Critics charged that it saved developers millions of dollars.

The two have made decisions that have pleased slow-growth advocates. Silverman voted with the rest of the council last fall to ban public water and sewer service to churches and other nonprofit organizations in the agricultural reserve. All other institutions already had to adhere to the ban, which limits development.

Leggett voted against the Friendship Heights master plan in 1998 because he believed it would bring too much housing. He also opposed building a megamall in Silver Spring, which residents said would increase traffic.