By Miranda S. Spivack
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Montgomery County officials, who promised to strengthen the county's limits on growth while leaving room for new development, are mired in a dispute over how to rewrite the rules.
Many County Council members who touted slower growth during last year's elections said they are dissatisfied with key sections of the county Planning Board's 300-page blueprint and expect to debate its proposals well into the fall, rather than finish this month.
The proposals are intended to encourage better urban and suburban design that creates neighborhoods and streets more inviting to pedestrians, cyclists and those who choose to use public transportation. And they urge the council to double the taxes that builders pay for schools and triple those paid for transportation. Home buyers would see a 45 percent increase in the recordation tax they pay.
The steeper taxes proposed for developers and home buyers strike some council members as burdensome. A new way of calculating road congestion based on the availability of public transit could depend too heavily on the willingness of commuters to ditch their cars, others say. And a new formula for school crowding, requiring developers to pay more when a school is at least 10 percent over capacity, has officials divided over when the new fees should kick in.
County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has weighed in, saying the proposed tax increases on the building industry are excessive and urging the council to reject any tax increase on people buying homes.
"I don't think there is consensus on much of anything at this point," said County Council member Nancy Floreen (D-At Large), a former Planning Board member and one of the few council members who backed a 2003 move to ease restrictions on development.
The growth policy, which is revised every two years, helps determine how many new homes and commercial projects can be built. Those decisions are tied directly to the availability of roads, schools and transit and are based on complex calculations that can take months to do. Most council members, said the council president, Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), believe the system, which underwent major changes four years ago, isn't working.
"We have insufficient current infrastructure and insufficient planning for the future," she said.
As for schools, which many believe are crucial to the county's economic well-being, the Planning Board proposes tweaking the definition of overcrowded so that impact taxes on new development kick in sooner. Leggett said the taxes should kick in even sooner. The council hasn't decided what it wants.
"I am open to doing things differently," Praisner said. "I want folks to feel comfortable with the process and understand what the implications are."
This year, after a failed bid by Praisner to impose a moratorium on development, the council asked the Planning Board to speed up its biennial review of the growth policy. Praisner had hoped a moratorium would give officials time to rethink the policy and avoid a rush by developers and builders before new rules took effect.
Praisner said she is confident that by November, when the current growth policy expires, a majority of the council will have agreed on the details to ensure that roads, schools and transit more closely match the needs of the growing county. Montgomery's population, nearing 1 million, is expected to grow by 25 percent in the next 25 years.
The county is expected to remain a magnet for biosciences, for people seeking good public schools and for the federal government, which plans to boost its presence substantially in Bethesda and Silver Spring.
The Planning Board recommends raising the taxes that builders pay for schools to $21,000 on every single-family detached home; raising taxes for transportation to $10,810 on a single-family detached home; and increasing the recordation tax on home sales from $6.90 to $10 per $1,000 of home value, with the first $50,000 exempted.
Leggett said he would back increases of 60 percent in the impact taxes for schools and transportation, not the much larger increases the Planning Board proposed.
"The direction I see us going is, is not to continue existing policy but not to go quite as far as the Planning Board," he said in an interview. "I support a moderate pace of growth consistent with our ability to provide infrastructure."
Many council members also hesitate to raise taxes to the levels recommended by the Planning Board.
The board also proposes putting more emphasis on the availability of public transit in determining whether an area is too congested for further development. That would encourage the placement of housing, jobs and retail near bus, subway and train lines. That, in turn, would help residents weather big leaps in gasoline prices and enable them to grow old in communities with shopping and other amenities within walking distance, said Royce Hanson, chairman of the Planning Board.
"It's a new way of thinking about growth policy in a mature county," Hanson said.
Jim Humphrey, who heads the land-use committee of the Montgomery County Civic Federation, said he believes the Planning Board's proposals include ideas his organization can support, most notably higher taxes on developers to pay for infrastructure. But he said the blueprint fails to address an existing deficit of roads, schools and transit.
"The Planning Board said in 2003 we didn't have the roads and schools to accommodate new growth," Humphrey said. "The Planning Board and council should try to figure out how to make things better, not simply prevent things from getting worse."
He said officials have approved about 30,000 housing units that will be built in the next few years and will cause more congestion.
"What is wrong with admitting we don't have the capacity to accommodate additional growth?" Humphrey asked.
Representatives of the building industry say the planning board is unfairly trying to force new development to pay for old problems. "About 85 percent of the need is from existing development," said Raquel Montenegro, a lobbyist with the Maryland National Capital Building Industry Association.
Council member Marc Elrich (D-At Large) said he is worried that the Planning Board's new way of calculating congestion fails to recognize what compels a commuter to drive, rather than take the bus or subway. Without a better transit system that runs more often to more places, he said, commuters will probably continue to opt for cars.
"If I build a project that generates jobs, transit and housing, the roads either will or will not function," Elrich said. The presence or absence of transit will not necessarily alter that equation, he believes.
Hanson said one of the board's goals was to try to find new ways to allow the county to absorb growth while maintaining a high quality of life.
"I thought we were supposed to be ahead of the curve," he said. "Hopefully, we will begin to find the golden mean."
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