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Back at the Drawing Board
Land-use expert Royce Hanson, 74, takes over this month as chairman of the Planning Board, the county's most powerful appointed position.
(By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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A land-use expert, Hanson left Montgomery County in the early 1980s to teach at universities in Minnesota and Texas. He returned in 1998 to teach at the policy sciences graduate program of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and until this week was director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy.
Hanson said he never expected to return to the planning agency. Looking back, he said, it's important to be modest "about one's confidence in one's own judgment." Hanson never anticipated, for instance, the demand to build large-scale churches in the county's agricultural reserve. "We were thinking of the country churches that served rural communities."
He has an affection for the county's intense community involvement, joking that zoning is something of a religious experience. "People really care, and that's good," he said.
That doesn't mean he'll always agree with a passionate argument. "There's a difference between listening and agreeing to everything you hear," he said. And he views his job as weighing in on what he described as a continuing ethical argument.
"Satisfying 'A' or 'B' will make one or the other happy, but may not necessarily serve the public interest," he said. "When you're the trustee of the future, you're making decisions in the best interest of your clients -- the public."
In the 1960s, Hanson was twice an unsuccessful Democratic nominee for Congress, and he lost in the Democratic primary for county executive in 1978. Like a skilled politician, he declined to get specific about subjects such as the intercounty connector or the Purple Line, a proposed light-rail link that would connect Bethesda, Silver Spring and New Carrollton.
"I try not to have an opinion based totally on a lack of information."
Likewise, although he has some ideas for propping up the county's trendsetting program that requires developers to build moderately priced units, he is not ready to try them out in print. His ideas "may be really bad," he said with a grin. "They need testing and arguing before creating expectations."
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