Planner's Extended Presence Matters

Montgomery County Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson said he wasn't worried about tie votes last week when he explained his desire to keep John Robinson on the board through most of July, saying he wanted to capitalize on Robinson's expertise and years of work on several issues that the board hopes to consider this month.

Those issues include the county's growth policy revisions, as well as several area master plans, including the complex effort underway to re-create White Flint as a walkable town center with multiple high-rises of up to 25 stories.

Robinson's term on the board expired last month. At Hanson's request, County Council President Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville) agreed to keep Robinson on the panel. Last week, it was clear that his continued presence made a difference.

Robinson arguably cast the tie-breaking vote last Thursday when the board voted 3 to 2 to allow Donohoe Development to move forward with plans to build a 457-unit apartment building and a nearby office building and commercial space, days before a moratorium on residential construction in Bethesda took effect. Had Robinson not been on the board, the vote would have been 2 to 2, and the proposal would have been defeated. Planning Commissioner Jean Cryor, although expressing reservations about the project, voted with Hanson and Robinson; the two no votes came from commissioners Joe Alfandre and Amy Presley.

The debate stretched for hours -- about 4 1/2 hours to be exact -- and throughout, Hanson looked to Robinson to help frame the legal questions facing the board, making it clear that he wanted to find a way to approve the project and not have it caught up in the moratorium.

Robinson and Hanson are lawyers, and Robinson regularly uses his legal skills in his day job, where he is an attorney-adviser in the general counsel's office of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The key question the two wanted answered: Was this project so "superior" that it met the terms of a special zoning measure that the County Council had passed, allowing the two properties, which are not adjacent, to be considered as one project. The "superiority" of the project was key to allowing the proposal to go through, under the terms of the zoning measure. Of course, defining superior building projects is a fine art, and Hanson said he was dismayed by the boxy design of the residential building and urged Donohoe to make it more inviting.

Hanson and Robinson stuck with that line of questioning for several rounds, pushing Donohoe's attorney and architects to come up with an answer that would then give them the legal grounds to vote for the project, six days before the moratorium took effect yesterday.

The moratorium is required by Montgomery's growth management law when school enrollment reaches a specific tipping point. School system data predict substantial crowding in Bethesda, Clarksburg and part of Germantown in five years unless classroom space is built. The data prompted the Planning Board on June 8 to approve the one-year residential building moratorium.

Yesterday's effective date for the restrictions would have snared the Donohoe project because it was not scheduled to reach the Planning Board until the middle of this month. The company asked the planners to speed things up. And the staff did that, despite expressing reservations about the design, which board members said they hoped could be resolved after they approved the project's preliminary outlines.

Meanwhile, Robinson said he is looking forward to a break from his 10 years of public service to the county; the past eight have been as a member of the Planning Board, where he is known for his sharp questioning of staff members and witnesses.

Lately, however, a rumor has been making the rounds that he is interested in returning next year as chairman, if Hanson does not seek reappointment. Robinson was somewhat circumspect about that possibility but did not rule it out in a brief interview Tuesday.