By Miranda S. Spivack
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 4, 2007

Montgomery County's Planning Board began exploring suggestions yesterday for managing growth that include increasing taxes on home buyers to help pay for schools, roads and public transit and halting development when school enrollment hits a specified ceiling.

In a wide-ranging discussion that will continue for several sessions, the board offered little comment about the proposals outlined by its staff in a report of more than 300 pages. But the call for higher taxes appears to mirror recent comments by Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson, who told a County Council committee last week that drastic measures, such as a major increase in the gasoline tax, might be needed to have a real impact on traffic congestion.

Among the board staff's proposals are doubling taxes that builders pay to fund schools to $21,000 on a single-family detached home; nearly tripling taxes for transportation to $10,810 on a single-family detached home; and increasing the recordation tax on residential home sales from $6.90 to $10 per $1,000 of home value.

The staff report yesterday offered the first public outlines of an effort by the Planning Board to respond to a County Council request to reexamine the county's growth policy. For years, the policy has generally been to allow construction while trying to ensure that schools, roads and other infrastructure kept pace. The county needs to take a different approach, Hanson said yesterday, as it evolves from a suburban county to one that is more urban with few remaining buildable tracts.

This year, the council will reexamine the growth policy. In January, the council rejected an attempt by the council's president, Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), to impose a moratorium on growth. The council told Hanson it needed advice on better ways to manage growth and asked his agency to speed up an already-planned reexamination.

Most council members have said the county needs to allow new housing and revitalize older neighborhoods while limiting the impact of growth on roads, schools and other county services. By 2030, the population, now nearing 1 million, could grow by more than 25 percent.

The current growth policy's goal is to coordinate growth and infrastructure so that "stuff wouldn't happen because we weren't ready for it," Hanson said. But the county should take a new approach, he said, that fosters mass transit and is more hospitable to pedestrians.

"It's a new way of thinking about growth policy in a mature county," Hanson said.

Raquel Montenegro, a lobbyist for the Maryland-National Capital Building Association who listened to the planning staff's presentation yesterday, said she was concerned that a big boost in taxes would price people out of the market and make it financially difficult for builders to keep doing business in Montgomery.

"Only a very small portion of the needs are generated by new development," she said.

The Planning Board will host a public panel discussion on growth policy at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at its Silver Spring headquarters. Board members will continue to discuss the staff recommendations Tuesday and Thursday.