Residents Feeling Left Out of Loop By Planners

Early Stage Lacks Pledged Openness, Group Says

In the post-Clarksburg era at Montgomery County's planning agency, openness was to be a guiding principle. No more big changes without public review. More systems in place to guarantee residents that what the Planning Board approved would be what communities got.

But residents living in or near two sections of the county pegged for major development -- west Gaithersburg and White Flint -- say the promise of more openness is not being applied at the earliest points in the planning process, when master plans take shape for large swaths of the county.

Master plans are guiding documents that outline ceilings for development, transportation, housing, schools and other infrastructure. Many community groups rely on them to try to understand what can and cannot be built near their neighborhoods. Officials are reworking master plans for several sections of the county, and the Planning Department is under substantial pressure from the County Council to deliver many of those plans in the next few years.

Members of a new community group, Residents for Reasonable Development, a consortium of neighborhoods likely to be affected by the "science city" proposed for west Gaithersburg by Johns Hopkins University, say they are worried. Hopkins had outlined a concept that calls for 22 million square feet of research and office space, 2,000 residences, about 60,000 jobs and some buildings on Belward Farm, which was willed to the university with the caveat that it not become another cookie-cutter housing development.

The residents group supports the overall idea, especially with its promise of jobs and housing, but asserts that the development envisioned is too dense for the area, even if a proposed light-rail or rapid bus line is eventually built.

In the aftermath of disputes that arose in 2005, when Clarksburg residents found that developers had strayed from approved plans, planners vowed to make their processes more transparent.

Despite numerous public meetings conducted by Hopkins officials and late last year by the county's planning staff regarding the Gaithersburg West master plan, residents such as Jan Fine said they did not comprehend precisely what Hopkins had in mind until very recently.

"The planning staff's process for public input was far more constricted than the process for other recent master plans," said Fine, spokeswoman for the new residents group and a resident of the nearby Mission Hills neighborhood. "We formed due to pure frustration."

She said the size of the plans under discussion would allow the equivalent of three campuses of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda or 100 Walmart Superstores. And that, she said, is simply too much for the area to absorb.

The Gaithersburg West plan, which would encompass the Hopkins proposal and other parts of the area, most of which is west of Interstate 270, is still being formulated by the planning agency's staff. Last week, staff members were given a few more weeks to finalize the proposal. The draft plan is expected to come to the Planning Board for review this month or early next month, officials said.

Fine said she is relatively new to community activism but is quickly getting up to speed. She said the planning staff conducted four public meetings over five weeks on the master plan. In Potomac several years ago, she said, the planning agency worked with a residents advisory committee for 18 months; and in Shady Grove, plans were discussed with the public for two years. At her side at a recent news conference was Pamela Lindstrom, a longtime activist on planning issues, who helped Fine give voice to her concerns.

The group is proposing an alternative that it says would result in about 38,000 jobs and a smaller footprint that clusters development closer to public transit, likely to be the unbuilt Corridor Cities Transitway.

Nancy Sturgeon, the planner working on the Gaithersburg West proposal, said she and others at the agency had given serious consideration to clustering most of the development near public transit. She said planners hope to create a dense, transit-centered, walkable development near Fallsgrove, the Universities at Shady Grove, Shady Grove Adventist Hospital and elsewhere.

"We want to focus the increased density near the transit stations," she said.

David McDonough, a top official at Hopkins overseeing its real estate, said that the science city concept, an approach at work in other parts of the country, is under discussion within the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama as part of economic stimulus efforts.

"They want to reposition the economy to be more technology- and science-based, something our Asian competitors already are highly immersed in," he said. He added that disagreement with neighbors over "quality of life" issues was not surprising and that he and Hopkins officials will continue to work closely with county officials and residents to refine the plans.

Hopkins officials organized several public meetings to discuss the plans, which they hope the planning agency will embrace as part of the larger Gaithersburg West plan. The planning agency also had four public meetings last year to talk about its overarching vision for the area.

And later this year there will be hearings at the Planning Board and at the County Council.

In the White Flint area, residents voiced similar complaints, saying that they are being kept in the dark, despite a lengthy public process. Some have said they are not being given access to transportation data and other details that could inform them as they review a major proposal to substantially increase the density with a mix of commercial, residential and office space near the White Flint Metro station.

Current planning agency staff proposals envision development that would make the area more dense than downtown Bethesda. But so far, the agency's transportation planners have not produced the documents on the impact on transit and roads that residents say they need to evaluate the plan.

Paula Bienenfeld, president of Luxmanor Citizens Association and a member of the Planning Board's White Flint advisory group, said she needs transportation data and design guidelines to make an informed judgment about the proposals. Speaking before she testified at a Planning Board meeting on White Flint on Monday night, Bienenfeld said she and others are hamstrung by the lack of written material.

"It is difficult to assess the plan with no data," she said.

The White Flint proposals are also expected to come to a vote at the Planning Board soon. The Gaithersburg West and the White Flint plans are subject to County Council approval, which probably could not come until late this year.