Competing Interests as Debate Begins

To Nanci Porten, CEO of Porten Homes, the proposed spike in taxes would further handicap what she called an already tough market for new home construction. In January, her company dropped the price of a 3,000 square-foot, four-bedroom home in Clarksburg Town Center by $150,000 to $558,000.

Porten, whose company has built 23 housing developments in Montgomery since 1989, has closely tracked the council's debate. She urged members to postpone for at least one year any discussion of a tax increase. The cost, she said, would be passed on to homebuyers or absorbed by builders and land developers.

"This is not the time," she said. "We have an affordability crisis and we have a market crisis."

If the regulations passed in Montgomery become too burdensome on builders, she added, companies could decide to take their business - and their tax dollars and jobs - to other jursidictions.

"If this environment is too hostile, builders can make the decision to go elsewhere or shelve their plans," she said.

Carter Willson, from an old Montgomery family, is a developer of small parcels of land. He says he's eager to continue to do business in the county and he's willing to pay more in taxes, but would like to see the increases phased in slowly.

That would help landowners, he said, "caught in the middle of this proposal, unexpectedly."

"I do not have deep pockets like some others," he said. "I am not one of the big, out of town guys."

He says the proposal to jack up impact taxes would dig too deeply into his profit margin to make it worthwhile to build.

Tony Hausner, a homeowner and longtime Silver Spring civic activist, believes the county's growth policy should actually say something about what he and many residents believe are Montgomery's hallmarks: affordable housing, environmental protection, liveable and safe neighborhoods, and good schools.

The new growth policy, he says, should be more like a quality-of-life manifesto instead of merely a technocratic recitation of what it takes to consider an intersection too clogged or a school too crowded.

"We could create incentives in the growth policy to encourage affordable housing. It is disappearing rapidly in Montgomery County. We need to change tax policy or try to find other financial incentives or development incentives to address that," said Hausner, who retired about 18 months ago from a career as a federal expert on the Medicare program.

"There is more that can be done to address other goals for the county using the growth policy. There is language in the document that talks about sustainability. Some of this could be done more immediately. There is more you can do about affordable housing and about the environment more immediately," he said.

Hausner has lived in Montgomery County for more than 30 years, and watched the ebb and flow in Silver Spring's downtown. He lived through the downturns, and now, like many of his neighbors, is mostly pleased with the area's revival. But he worries about street crime.

"In Silver Spring, we seem to be seeing more crime lately, and there are not enough police to fight the crime," he said.

He thinks clamping down on crime should be part of the growth debate, by addressing police understaffing as part of the analysis of neighborhood development.

Still, he believes the planning board's current proposal is better than a document put together by the County Council in 2003 over the board's objections.

"But we recommend tighter standards still for traffic tests and school crowding tests," he said.