Competing Interests as Debate Begins

By Miranda S. Spivack and Ann E. Marimow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 2, 2007

A small business owner in Rockville urges Montgomery County's council to halt new construction until it fixes the jammed roads that force him to pay workers to sit in traffic.

A developer with land in Damascus warns that a proposed hefty tax hike on new homes will cripple his business.

And a civic activist in Silver Spring says the county's growth policy, now being revised, should serve as a manifesto for affordable housing, clean air, and liveable neighborhoods.

As council members start debating new development rules this week, those are among the competing consituent concerns they'll have to weigh in a county where the median price for newly constructed single-family homes has topped $1 million but an increasingly diverse population needs more classrooms, better public transit and cheaper housing.

The outcome in one of the Washington area's largest counties could influence other goverments in the region trying to balance growth and services.

Council members have given themselves until Nov. 15, when the current growth policy expires, to complete their work. Their decisions will determine the amount of the taxes paid by developers to build new homes and by homebuyers and sellers at closing; when developers will have to pay to reduce traffic congestion; and how new projects can blend better with the environment. Their starting point is a package of proposals approved last week by the planning board that would put most of the tax burden on new projects.

Before the end of County Executive Isiah Leggett's term in 2010, Montgomery's population is expected to reach 1 million. In the last 12 years, the county has added 157,000 people, 92,000 jobs and 48,000 homes. While its rapid expansion has tapered off and county planners say it has "entered a phase of slower growth," Montgomery is on track to steadily add new employment and residences even as the land available for new construction is dwindling.

The real estate market remains relatively robust: home prices have continued to climb, although houses are staying on the market longer, up to an average of two and a half months this year, compared to less than one month in 2005, according to the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors.

Council president Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County) said members have a range of concerns about how to settle questions about measuring traffic, figuring out when schools are too crowded, and still ensuring that longtime residents don't foot too much of the bill for the effects of new construction.

"Are the tests realistic?" she asked. "Do they adequately capture conditions today?" And proposed tax increases, which the planning board last week recommended, will compel the council to balance "the escalating costs of infrastructure with the volatility of the market." Members are worried that too much taxation could hamper the business climate in the county, she said.

As the council's committee with jurisdiction over development began debating the new proposals yesterday, some members were sharply critical of the planning board's approach, saying it would allow new development but did not do enough to improve public transit or limit traffic jams. Planning board chairman Royce Hanson defended the proposal as allowing an expected influx of new residents and jobs while building a more liveable, transit-oriented community.

The details of constituents' worries differ, but ultimately they sound the same refrain: When the rules for managing growth are rewritten, how will it affect my daily life?

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.

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.