Competing Interests as Debate Begins

The revitalization of downtown Silver Spring has been good for Nani Shrestha's car repair business at Fenton and Bonifant streets, but not, he says, for the safety of his customers. In late afternoon, cars back up on Fenton Street for a half-mile and impatient drivers use his parking lot as a short cut around the traffic light.

"It's chaos here. They fly through," said Shrestha. "I'm afraid somebody is going to get hit one day."

Shrestha has urged the Montgomery County council to halt development in areas of the county that are already jammed with cars. That view is shared by John Roper, who chose to locate his deck maintenance business in Rockville 15 years ago because it allowed his workers to zip to jobs in most parts of the county within 20 minutes. Back then, each truck could cover eight to 12 jobs a day. Roper is lucky now if his workers get to three sites in a day and schedules his trucks around the county's traffic patterns.

"If you're in Olney after 3 p.m., forget it. I have to pay these guys to sit in traffic," he said. "We're getting squeezed."

His angst inspired him to write to the council for the first time to ask members to slow new construction and to give people like him as much voice in the growth debate as the county's development interests.

"We don't want to make it worse than it already is," he said. "I want to be included in the decisions."

From her home in Bethesda, Katherine McGreivy, a mother of four, has watched her neighborhood - a short walk from downtown - evolve in the past decade. Unlike some of her neighbors, McGreivy had supported a new project by Federal Realty Investment Trust to replace a downtown supermarket with a six-story luxury apartment building. She likes much of what Federal Realty has done to help spur the creation of a bustling urban village in Bethesda's southwestern section, near Barnes & Noble and the Capital Crescent Trail.

But lately, the hustle and bustle has begun to bother her. The prospect of a new hotel, office building and apartments planned near Barnes & Noble may simply make the area too congested, she fears. The projects also are threatening the viability of the highly popular Crescent biker/hiker trail.

More people moving in will bring more cars, she said. Just because residents are walking distance to Metro doesn't mean they will take public transportation to buy groceries on Rockville Pike.

"I am getting very fed up with the county's growth policy," McGreivy said. "We are going to reach a tipping point. They are not going to realize it until they are there. Bethesda is not going to be a great place to live, and congestion and density will make it difficult to live here."

For the home building industry in Montgomery, the answer to the growth rules debate is clear: Don't shut us down with too-high taxes.

The Planning Board is urging the county council to nearly triple the taxes developers pay to help build for a new single family detached home to about $31,000.