Report on Growth Policy Forum

The Montgomery County Planning Board held its Growth Policy Forum on May 5th at M-NCPPC headquarters in Silver Spring on Saturday. I attended the meeting along with Pat Burda, the Chair of the Town of Chevy Chase Long Range Planning Committee.

Presentation of Growth Policy Recommendations
Karl Moritz, Chief of the Research and Technology Division of the Planning Department, presented the report and recommendations of his department's Growth Policy Study. The actual report is long and hard to digest so I recommend the Summary Report to get a good overview of the recommendations. It would be great if the Department would post a copy of Mr. Moritz's powerpoint on their website. Unfortunately, his presentation was longer than the hour alloted to it so some important slides whizzed by the audience.

The recommendations were complex and hard to digest. However, a few points grabbed me. The Planning Department made a few recommendations that should tighten measurements of growth capacity which should make it harder to gain approval for new developments or subject developers to increased fees if developments are approved.

First, the Planning Board wants to revise the definition of school capacity so that the definition is closer to the MCPS definition of capacity. They also suggest raising the school facilities payment, the extra money a developer pays when projected increases in students are above the capacity of the schools to absorb them. The staff also recommends that the practice of borrowing capacity from another school cluster should cease.

I believe that Mr. Moritz admitted that this fee has never been assessed in the past and no development had been stopped due to problems of school capacity. However, I couldn't tell if this would change if the staff recommendations are adopted. Did anyone else who attended the meeting catch the answer to this question?

Changes in the calculation of transportation capacity were also proposed by Planning Department staff. The primary recommendation was the adoption of new standard for assessing whether an area has additional capacity called the Policy Area Mobility Review (PAMR). Without going into the gory details, places with better public transit and less traffic will tend to pass this test which appears to measure the length of time it would take to make a trip either by transit or by car.

I couldn't help but notice that virtually all areas of the County would be deemed to have additional transportation capacity under the proposed standard. One wonders if the standard was selected independently of knowledge of its impact on growth policy. While Jim Humphrey questioned the new measure, I wonder if any problems with the standard relate more to the levels deemed acceptable rather than standard itself.

Panel Discussion
After this introductory presentation, Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson emceed a lively panel discussion on growth policy which even included "lightening rounds". (Maybe he can replace Bob Barker if this job gets too tough?) The panelists came from diverse backgrounds. Business interests were well represented. Georgette "Gigi" Godwin is President of the MoCo Chamber of Commerce. Chris Weber is the Director of Planning for Federal Realty, perhaps best known as the largest developer in downtown Bethesda. Bob Spalding is a project manager for homebuilder Miller and Smith. Ralph Bennett is the President of Bennett Frank McCarthy Architects, which designed both King Farm and Clarksburg Town Center. Leonard Bogorod is a real estate consultant with Robert Charles Lesser & Co.

Advocates of limits on growth or major changes in development policy in MoCo were also well represented on the panel. MoCo Sierra Club Vice Chair Pam Lindstrom and Neighbors for a Better Montgomery Executive Director Drew Powell were both on the panel. Jim Humphrey is Chair of the Planning and Land Use Committee for the Montgomery County Civic Federation and a longtime advocate of limits on growth. Amy Presley is President of the Clarksburg Town Center Advisory Committee and led the team that uncovered the violations of county laws which plagued that development.

Jim Soltesz is President of Loiederman Soltesz Associates, a major planning, engineering, and environmental services firm. Stuart Rochester is best known as a historian and author of Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, but has been involved in land use issues for two decades and lives in Burtonsville. The panel discussion was lively and interesting but ran over the expected time by about 30 minutes which was a pity because it began to feel repetitive in the last 20 minutes.

Pro-development advocates expressed feeling appalled at the idea that the County was reaching "build out" (i.e. that additional growth in the County should cease) and argued that growth adds revenue to the County which enables it to provide services. They (and Mr. Moritz) pointed out that growth was slowing down in percentage terms, a factoid made less compelling by the basic math fact that an increase of 100,000 people is a smaller percentage increase on a larger population base.

Panelists disagreed about the idea of greater density at Metro stations. Pam Lindstrom repeatedly mentioned that studies of growth in Arlington showed that greater density around Metro stations resulted in no increased traffic. However, another panelist stated that only around 20% of people who lived near Metro travelled by Metro.

Several panelists mentioned the need to take into account the environmental impact of growth, though there was naturally debate about whether this cost should be borne by additional fees placed on development. Bob Spalding argued that many of the increased fees which were already in the proposal would significantly raise costs to developers and translate into higher home prices, though I wondered if at least part of the cost would be absorbed by the developer as lower profit even if his point had some merit.

Chris Weber articulated the importance of providing incentives to encourage development where the County wants it to occur. I think this may have simply meant that the County should continue to build and maintain garages and support the Metro (and other similar public amenities) as in downtown Bethesda. At this point, I think it is safe to say that Federal Realty needs no further encouragement to develop its properties there as they are already chomping at the bit.

I should add that Mr. Weber was disarmingly honest, admitting that he was part of the transportation problem as he and his family live in Howard County and he commutes around 30 miles to his office in Montgomery every day. The "Chris Webers of the world" became a synonym for people with long commutes by the end of the meeting.

Someone else pointed out that the Kentlands and King Farm occurred within Rockville and Gaithersburg and that thinking should occur about how to encourage similar smart growth developments in unincorporated parts of the County. Anyone have any thoughts or comments on this point?

Community Input
The two most influential members of the audience were Council President Marilyn Praisner (D-4) and Councilman Marc Elrich (D-At large). Marilyn Praisner took to the mike for a few minutes before the community got going. Both councilmembers spent a good deal of time at the meeting and talking with attendees.

Virtually all of the comments I heard during the portion of comments I was able to stay for seemed to ask for further tightening of capacity standards for growth. One woman asked how the Planning Department staff could view so many schools as having additional capacity with all of the portable classrooms around the County. Another vehemently argued that there was no more transportation capacity in East Silver Spring.

Your gentle blogger also stepped up to the mike. I called for eliminating the ability of developers to get around transportation capacity limits through the provision of various amenities that do nothing or almost nothing to mitigate traffic. The audience applauded when I said something along the lines of "a whimsical bench at a bus stop does not mitigate traffic."

I also argued that the ability to buy and sell air rights subverted the intent of the Master Plan. For example, if the developer of the Pier One property on Wisconsin Ave. successfully acquires the air rights of the nearby church, the developer will be able to construct a much taller building which will loom over adjoining neighborhood of single-family homes.

The increased height will make it harder to achieve the transition desired between the high-density commercial district and the single-family home residential area. It will also make it less likely that the design goal of having tall buildings near Metro but declining height as one gets away from the location of the stop. In short, I was trying to argue that builders should be able to construct buildings within the Plan that fit within the character of the area but should not be allowed to use these measures to build larger developments than originally envisioned in the Master Plan.