Planners Agreed to Hide Deal With School

Montgomery Forgoes Potential Penalties in Tree-Protection Case

Connelly School of the Holy Child, a 320-student girls' school in Potomac, approached Montgomery County officials last winter, hoping to build an artificial turf athletic field. County inspectors visited the site and soon came to some troubling conclusions.

The school appeared to have violated a forest protection plan required when Holy Child applied to construct a new building in 1999. The potential penalties were steep: as much as $250,000, county officials said. A public hearing was set for May.

But in an unusual arrangement, the county planning director, Rollin Stanley, canceled the hearing, and he agreed to drop the penalties and keep the allegations out of the public record.

Stanley decided that the planning agency would not pursue allegations that the school removed trees without permission; failed to remove two trailers and plant trees in their place; wrongly extended a playing field, which agency records show the school had been cited for in 2002; cut down understory; and built part of a parking lot in a protected area.

The school agreed to make corrections and do more planting, on and off the site.

Holy Child also agreed to provide two full seven-year scholarships, worth about $20,000 a year, to county students and to expand its environmental curriculum. The agreement, made available to The Washington Post after a public-records request, appears to have no precedent at the agency.

On July 21, a day after the Planning Board approved the artificial turf field, Stanley issued a news release heralding the county's "partnership" with the school but did not mention the potential fines or the specific allegations of wrongdoing. Nor did his news release mention that the partnership was the product of a settlement of a legal dispute or that the deal barred the planning staff from publicly raising the allegations.

Board member Amy Presley, who raised the issue during the July 20 board meeting, said the secrecy made her uneasy. "The staff report did not indicate that there was a settlement agreement or what the agreement was based on," she said. "That is the kind of lack of transparency I don't think we should tolerate," she said in an interview.

Stanley said the public and the school benefited.

"Instead of having a penalty, we turned this into a positive for many, many people, and that includes the county," he said at the meeting. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

The arrangement angered some neighbors.

"The public has a right to know what that settlement is. We have no opportunity to comment on it," said Ginny Barnes, a local environmental activist. She alleged that neighbors "have watched long years of violations and disregard for the environment on this property."