Suburbia's Sidewalk Squabbles
Adding Walkways in Montgomery Threatens Lawns and Trees But Mostly Neighborhood Peace

By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Not in my front yard.

That's the fresh twist on an old cry often heard by Montgomery County officials as they work to squeeze sidewalks onto suburban streets.

Spurred by a growing emphasis on pedestrian safety and neighborhood walkability, Montgomery spends more than $1 million a year to retrofit sidewalks onto the looping streets of post-World War II subdivisions. The projects are popular -- there is a backlog of about 150 applications from residents hoping to get their neighborhoods on the list. But they are also reliably divisive, often pitting newer residents with children against empty nesters and side-street residents who stand to lose a chunk of lawn.

"I moved here because it didn't have sidewalks; I like the suburban atmosphere," said August Spector, 65, a 25-year resident of Potomac's Fox Hills West, where the county last week approved a 3,200-foot length of sidewalk that will shave several yards from several yards, including Spector's. "People who moved into this neighborhood knew full well what they were getting."

County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) emphasized new sidewalks as part of the pedestrian safety initiative he announced in December, calling for a survey of sidewalk conditions in close-in neighborhoods and additional money for new construction. That almost guarantees future fights such as those in recent years on Bethesda's Maryknoll Avenue and Kensington's Carriage Road Drive.

"A lot of homeowners take it personally," said Richard Earp, manager of Montgomery's sidewalk program. "While they may know that the county has the right of way for a sidewalk, they've mowed that grass for 20 or 30 years, and now all these people are going to be walking on what they have thought of as their yard."

In the North Potomac community of Quince Orchard Knolls, opponents of a recently proposed sidewalk have raised a host of objections: fears of liability, the loss of trees and the irony that homeowners will be required, by law, to shovel snow from sidewalks they didn't want. The first neighborhood meeting on the issue grew so contentious that the citizens association brought in professional mediators for the next one, held last month.

"This neighborhood was never laid out for sidewalks," said Joe McHugh, a 22-year resident of the neighborhood. "I have questions about the whole process."

The fights are largely a legacy of a building boom after World War II during which suburban street builders scrapped the city grid pattern in favor of winding lanes and cul-de-sacs. The idea of lining that complex filigree with sidewalks barely came up, said Dick Tustian, Montgomery's planning director from 1969 to 1990.

"It was a whole ethos of the time, part of our love affair with the automobile," Tustian said. "Sidewalks weren't considered necessary. Now there is new paradigm gaining acceptance to return the street to a pedestrian place. It's really taken hold in the last five years."

Legally, Earp said, the county doesn't need neighborhood permission to install a sidewalk within the 17 feet of right of way it owns along most primary residential streets. But, in addition to traffic and safety studies, officials take local opinion into account, he said. After a brutal dust-up in Bethesda, the county now holds a public hearing on any contested sidewalk proposal.

In Fox Hills West, the sidewalk approval process had erupted into a full-blown neighborhood battle by the time Leggett approved the $94,000 project last month. The clash has featured dueling legal opinions, accusations of rigged surveys, a confiscated newsletter and allegations of election irregularities within the local citizens group.

"It's taken on a life of its own," said Charles Thomas, a psychologist and 27-year resident of Fox Hills West. "This has been a very quiet, peaceful neighborhood up until this whole business of sidewalks came up."

Thomas and other sidewalk opponents said there have been no pedestrian accidents reported along the proposed route for the sidewalk, a curving six-block stretch of Falls Chapel Way ending at Cold Springs Elementary School. And without a safety problem, he sees no reason to pave over the fescue, uproot the Bradford pear trees and generally "change the character of the neighborhood" that he found so appealing as a homebuyer three decades ago.

His chief adversary, Kenneth Cho, a radiologist and five-year resident of the neighborhood, said the pedestrian conditions are dicey, even if the worst hasn't happened. His youngest child walks in the road to the school, which doesn't provide bus service, accompanied by his wife, who is legally blind.

"It was obvious to us that this was needed as soon as we moved in," said Cho, who first applied to the county for a sidewalk in 2003. "We've got a walking school, we've got a street with double lines."

Cho's first run at a sidewalk for the neighborhood was turned down when a county official found no particular safety risk. When other sidewalk proponents filed a new application last year, opponents accused them of not just of an unfair do-over but of packing the Fox Hills West Residents Association board and using the supposedly neutral body to promote the sidewalk.

Cho was elected president of the association in December, but opponents declared him ineligible because of a technicality in the bylaws. When a new group of board members, most of them living along the proposed route of the sidewalk, held their own vote in January, electing Thomas as president, Cho and others accused them of an illegitimate power grab. Cho made his case in the next edition of the Huntsman, the group's newsletter. The new board stopped Cho's newsletter and distributed its own.

"I never, ever thought it would go this far," Cho said.

Tensions remain high in the neighborhood. Residents received letters from the county this week saying that sidewalk construction would begin April 7. And the fight over control of the association continues.

But there may be hope for peace in the long term. Robin Rosenblum, a sidewalk advocate who was at the center of the Maryknoll Avenue fight, said the wounds eventually healed and the path has become a neighborhood gathering place.

"Even people who opposed it use it all the time," she said.