Rollin Stanley, Montgomery County’s star planning director, favors channeling growth to walkable downtowns, encouraging mixed-use development with significant density and even using congestion to force people onto transit. Furthermore, he is not a patient man when pursuing his goals. Both his philosophy and his tactics are drawing resistance.
Few county residents will agree with Stanley’s statement that “congestion is a good thing.” Voters here will never accept an approach that gives up on congestion relief. Only seven years ago, a County Council slate called “End Gridlock” won a majority by promising to build the ICC and other transportation improvements. There are a variety of proposals for easing congestion circulating in the county, including the Purple Line and the CCT, widening I-270 and Marc Elrich’s BRT system proposal. Advocates of some of these projects may disagree with each other, but all of them are marketed to some extent as congestion relief. No serious county politician will ever echo Stanley’s position in public.
But Stanley’s bigger problem is that he shows no respect for the county’s system of dealing with development and growth. For decades, the county’s politics have revolved around a tension between prosperity and quality of life. Prosperity furthers economic well-being, but it also creates traffic, density and change. Quality of life depends in part on prosperity, but it erodes when the externalities of excessive growth gridlock roads and crowd schools. Small battles between developers and neighbors over individual projects have fueled opposing political ideologies, creating a swinging pendulum over many election cycles.
For all the debate over growth, the county has kept a lid on all-out civil war by fashioning a system to balance competing interests at the project level and the macro level (especially on growth policy). That system involves abundant input from all sides, intense analysis of issues by planning staff and hearing examiners, avoidance of any appearance of impropriety and, above all, the impartial enforcement of lots and lots of rules. Stanley, a smart man in a hurry, cares nothing about any of this.
Our sources are quick to elaborate. One spy says, “He’s a bull in a china shop. He has a get it done attitude (a good thing) and little patience for rules, regulations and process that get in his way (not such a good thing in this county). He has some great ideas but an even greater ego.” Another informant complains, “Most arrogant man on the planet. Has pulled projects from staff when they wouldn’t write it his way, and wrote reports himself. Told staffers not to attend meetings so they couldn’t be questioned, hates citizen groups and constructed Master Plan committees to minimize citizen input and maximize developer input. Convenes citizen groups to use them as paper dressing, then ignores their input… Views residents as obstacles to the planners’ efforts to build the perfect world which will resolve all our ills.”
Still another observer says, “Attitude is everything and Rollin’s sucks. If he weren’t condescending and dismissive, including to elected officials and his staff, he could probably get stuff done. Seriously, personality and relationships is 95% of success, and he just doesn’t care.” And one more informant claims that Stanley gets involved in the aesthetic details of projects, an activity that goes far beyond the bounds of his job. “He’s like a developer with no money and he imposes his personal preferences on what you should build.” This source claims that Stanley will go so far as to draw building sketches on napkins to instruct developers on what they should do. “They don’t know their roles. They don’t follow the rules and they don’t stay within the boundaries of their roles.”
And one of the county’s most knowledgeable growth experts said this:My personal view is that he’s an arrogant egotist and apparently, based on what the Post and Examiner reported, he thinks he’s above the rules. Unfortunately, if he considers himself and his staff above the rules established for internal M-NCPPC audit investigations, then I hold out little hope that he will aid in transitioning the Planning Department and Board toward what residents hoped would be a more transparent and citizen-inclusive process. And [Planning Board Chairman Royce] Hanson appears to be shielding Stanley, which is probably encouraging his bad behavior.
Not all our sources are so hard on Stanley. One says he is “Extremely sharp and forward thinking . Probably frustrated with the lack of political will to adopt new ideas and think as creatively as he does.” Another says:I think he is very talented and can provide some really good ideas. Royce is kind of running interference for him which is hurting him. It doesn’t allow him to hear what people are saying, he’s not getting a good feel for the community, and he’s not learning how to deal with all of the different factions in the County. As a result, I don’t think he is getting as rooted in the community as he needs to be to be successful. I also think this makes him a little tone deaf to issues. All solvable issues which is the good thing.
Stanley’s methods were on full display during the Bethesda Metro Center 4 controversy last year. A developer wanted to build a new 16-story office tower on top of the Bethesda Metro Station in close proximity to two other buildings. The problem with the proposal was that the floor area ratio for the tract contained in the area’s Master Plan did not permit enough density to allow the project to go forward. Stanley favored the project anyway, criticized its opponents in public and reversed a recommendation by his staff to oppose it. The problem was that Stanley advocated changing how floor area ratio is calculated to get this one project through, a sweeping alteration that would have allowed more density on sprawl projects everywhere else in the county. The Planning Board unanimously denied approval.
These sorts of activities are generating considerable pushback in both the development and civic communities. They may also be creating tensions within the planning staff, who are the likely sources for Post reporter Miranda Spivack’s long series of negative articles about Stanley’s credit card issues. Ethical questions can hurt in process-obsessed Montgomery County.
It’s not too late for Rollin Stanley to turn around his fortunes and nudge the county towards its smart growth future. Here are a few things he should do.
1. Don’t get too involved in individual projects. It’s beneath the role of the planning director. Leave the little stuff to the staff. It’s their job to deal with it.
2. Focus on a few big priorities. How about redeveloping Wheaton, updating the other central business district master plans and laying out a framework for building a truly countywide transit system?
3. Go out and listen. Stanley is known to be a great speaker, but the county is full of speakers who are tired of hearing each other talk. The people who have lived and operated businesses in the county know more about our transportation and growth challenges than any planner with less than three years residency. And who knows? Some of them may be able to show Stanley a good idea or two he has yet to see in his travels.
4. Settle down and build relationships. This is the most important skill for a politician, and it is also extremely important for an administrator. This means engaging in give-and-take, admitting when you’re wrong and occasionally cutting your losses for the benefit of better relations down the road.
If Stanley can do these things, he will realize his potential and the county will be better off. If not, he won’t last. We’ll probably know which way this is going by the summer of 2011, a year after Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson’s successor takes office and determines whether Stanley should stay or go.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Rollin Stanley: Problem and Potential, Part Two
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Rollin Stanley: Problem and Potential, Part One
Montgomery County Planning Director Rollin Stanley is starting to hit a wall. That’s a problem – not only for him, but also for the county that depends on him.
Rollin Stanley is not an ordinary public servant. He is the choice of legendary Montgomery County Planning Chairman Royce Hanson to be the leader of the county’s planning staff. That is a hugely important position given the fact that the staff writes master plans that guide future development, drafts revisions to the growth policy every two years and reviews individual development projects for conformance with the county’s tests and standards. When Hanson hired Stanley in December 2007, many believed he was a visionary super star. And maybe he is.
Stanley is not a bureaucrat or administrator. He is a big thinker and a change agent in a county that says it values those qualities but does not reward them. In his prior positions as a staffer in Toronto’s planning department and as the chief planner in St. Louis for six years, Stanley worked for the ideal of walkable, interesting and revitalized urban neighborhoods.
The River Front Times wrote a lengthy profile of Stanley in 2004, more than two years into his tenure as the planning head in St. Louis. The Times summarized Stanley’s goals this way:Rollin Stanley has bold plans for St. Louis. If he had his way, downtown’s one-way streets would be eliminated, buildings would have to retrofit their basements to include showers for bicyclists, and bike lanes would meander alongside major thoroughfares. Stanley envisions a pedestrian paradise where workers, residents and visitors can window-shop and run errands. He also wants more teeth put in Missouri’s planning and zoning laws; currently, his department isn't required by law to examine, approve -- or see -- any proposed deviation from the zoning guidelines and comprehensive land-use plan.
The Times said this about Stanley’s advocacy for mixed-use redevelopment in downtowns:Then Stanley moves on to the future of residential downtown developments, in crumbling districts and in thriving areas like the Central West End. He stresses the importance of mixed-use developments, buildings with ground-level retail and residential above. His favorite residential development is the Louderman Lofts on Locust. His office is across the street. “I can walk out and, within two blocks, I can go to the hardware store, I can have lunch, I can go to the dry cleaners; just down the street I can go to the pharmacy. I can go to a restaurant. I can go to Famous-Barr. I can go to a men’s clothing store, and the list goes on and on. I can do all those things because that’s such an urban building.”
Montgomery County has an influential and growing smart growth community that would agree with Stanley’s outlook. Downtown Bethesda, Downtown Silver Spring and Rockville Town Square are all popular residential, retail and employment locations. But while quite a few people may want to see more transit-oriented development in flourishing downtowns, Stanley has advocated some provocative ways to get there.
New high-rises, he said, should offer a wide range of units that are affordable, not only to empty-nesters with money to burn, but to twentysomethings with a craving to live in the city.
“When I first came here,” he says, “I couldn’t believe the size of the units people were building. What created a market in places like Denver or Toronto was smaller units -- first-home buyers. And nobody’s hitting that market. Nobody.” Developers tend to balk, he says, at middle-income condos. “They say, ‘Well, I’m not sure. They’re only making $40,000.’ But they’re buying a unit from you! What are they going to do, go upstairs and steal somebody’s TV? No. They’re going to be vested in the property. And that’s going to be a wonderful thing for the city, because instead of living in O’Fallon in a townhome, they’ll be able to walk to work.”
“All those things are baby steps to success,” Stanley concludes. “Now you’ve got bikes downtown, and you’ve got people walking, you start to see people thinking differently about the street patterns. But there’s tremendous resistance down there.”
“Congestion is a good thing,” Stanley once told a planning forum in St. Louis. “Some people might not believe that. But think about any city that you like and compare it to here. Chicago is congested. Boston, Seattle, they’re all congested. You’ve got to look at the street patterns, and one-way streets are a disaster. They kill retail… density, to some people in St. Louis, is a four-letter word.”
Stanley later told a planning forum in Montgomery County a similar message according to the Washington Business Journal: “We’ve added 195,000 people since 1988 and they took up 40,000 acres of land. We don't have that for the next 195,000 people,” Stanley said, adding that the only land the county has left is 8,000 acres of surface parking lots, 14,000 acres of non-continuous vacant land, and 10,500 acres of land around Metro stations.
The idea of using congestion to push people towards transit is shared by some in the smart growth community. To be fair, Stanley’s recommended growth policy does not merely do that. The policy combined relieving developers of some traffic mitigation requirements, relaxing congestion standards, encouraging development in town centers (some of which are far from transit) and encouraging more density near strip malls to enable shorter car trips. Your author questioned whether all of these recommendations were really smart growth – especially those allowing more development away from transit – and the County Council expressed its reservations by defeating or deferring most of them.
Pointing to a decline in two parent homes in Montgomery County - from 50 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2006 - Stanley said there is less of a need for 3,000-square-foot homes. “People don’t think kids can live in high-rises, but they can and they do. Not everyone wants to live in a single family home with a lawn to mow,” he said.
“In Montgomery County, two factors influence development - schools and road capacity,” Stanley said. “That pushes development to where there is no congestion, but it should go the other way, because congestion will force people onto public transportation.”
Despite Stanley’s visionary capacity – or perhaps, because of it – he faces some stiff challenges in Montgomery County. We’ll explore them in Part Two.
