Last night, Chevy Chase Land Company President David Smith and I spoke at the Rollingwood community association's annual meeting about the review of the sector plan at Chevy Chase Lake. David asked me to let people know that the Land Company supports having no construction at Chevy Chase Lake "until after the construction of the Purple Line."
I am sure that the community will appreciate this commitment and hope that it is embodied in the final revision of the Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan. Elza Hisel-McCoy, the member of the Planning Staff overseeing the revision of the Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan, also came and outlined the sector plan review process.
Showing posts with label planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label planning. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Chevy Chase Lake Construction News
Monday, June 29, 2009
Planning Staff Recommends BRT for CCT
In striking contrast to recommendation for light rail (LRT) for the Purple Line, the Planning Board Staff has recommended bus-rapid transit (BRT) for the Corridor City Transitway (CCT).
If the decision to opt for BRT sticks, politicians may find that strong statements made regarding the great superiority of light rail over bus-rapid transit come back to bite them (darn Google and those digital records!) as they must explain to Upcounty residents why they should get the cheaper, much-derided buses but the Downcounty must have the vastly more expensive light rail. (Your gentle blogger has argued for BRT for both modes.)
Next post: the plan to pay for transit. Here is the press release from the Planning Board:Planners Recommend Bus Rapid Transit for Proposed Corridor Cities Transit Project; Planning Board Schedules Public Hearing July 6
SILVER SPRING – Montgomery County planners have recommended bus rapid transit, a system designed to move transit vehicles past traffic congestion on dedicated lanes, for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), a planned public transportation project linking Shady Grove with Clarksburg.
Following recommendations rolled out in the draft Gaithersburg West Master Plan, planners have endorsed a route for the CCT that follows a long established alignment from the Shady Grove Metro Station through Gaithersburg, Middlebrook and Germantown on its way to Clarksburg. However, planners recommend a change to the previously planned route through the Life Sciences Center near Gaithersburg.
Responding to a Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) report, planners also addressed a proposed expansion of I-270 as another strategy to improve mobility in the heavily traveled corridor. The expansion could include preferential lanes for high occupancy vehicles and drivers willing to pay a toll. Both projects would try to alleviate chronic traffic concerns in the I-270 Corridor, the economic engine of Montgomery County.
Planners made their recommendations based on MDOT’s Alternatives Analysis/Environmental Assessment report. Their recommendations go to the Planning Board, which has scheduled a July 6 public hearing to allow residents and others to have their say.
The board’s recommendation will be considered by the County Council’s transportation committee on July 13. Once the Council has collected input, it will send the county’s collective position on the two transportation projects back to the state.
The CCT has long been proposed along I-270, and the Planning Board has featured the CCT as an integral part of master plans for Gaithersburg West and Germantown. The transit route would support a growing number of workers and proposed new residences in those areas. In the state report, transportation planners evaluated premium bus, light rail and bus rapid transit. By choosing bus rapid transit, county planners have endorsed an alternative that is estimated to cost around $450 million. The CCT is expected to carry up to 27,000 people daily by 2030.
Planners say bus rapid transit would link activity centers in the corridor, maximize connections to other transit routes such as Metro, and increase opportunities for funding and construction phasing that would allow it to be built quickly.
As part of their proposal, planners recommend adding a busway segment through the Life Sciences Center that creates a loop serving Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, the Universities at Shady Grove, the emerging Johns Hopkins University campus, a redeveloped county Public Safety Training Academy site and other businesses. That new route, which would support proposed residential development, existing and planned heath sciences and hospital facilities, and biomedical research initiatives, has been the subject of much discussion as the Planning Board prepares to finalize its draft of the Gaithersburg West Master Plan next month.
The state report combines the CCT with I-270 highway improvements. Planners recommend that the CCT go first to emphasize the most affordable, green solution by combining transit and mixed use development to support a community less dependent on auto travel.
Planners reviewed the highway alternatives presented by the state and recommended a combination of express toll lanes and high-occupancy vehicle lanes. Express toll lanes provide a speedy and reliable option by charging a toll that varies depending on the time and day of use. The I-270 improvements, extending well into Frederick County, may cost up to $3.9 billion and could displace up to 260 homes, although transportation officials believe that number can be reduced significantly by minimizing the width of roadway shoulders and constructing retaining walls.
Adding a combination of high-occupancy lanes and tolls also would encourage people to commute longer distances by bus or rail and use the highway for carpooling to transit stations, planners say.
Planners also recommended that the County Council establish a working group to pursue potential funding for the CCT in addition to existing public transportation like Metro and Ride On.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Ilaya Hopkins for Planning Board
I have no hesitation in suggesting that the County Council should appoint Ilaya Rome Hopkins to the Planning Board. She'd be an outstanding addition and bring valuable skills to the Board.
No question about it, the Planning Board is one of the toughest jobs in Montgomery County. Yet it also among the most important. Here are some of the reasons that I think Ilaya would be an excellent Board member:
Knowledge and Organization. Ilaya has been intimately involved in the Planning process on a number of occasions but particularly in the BRAC/Medical Center process. One of the most complex and quick changes to Montgomery County, Ilaya mastered to material and as is one of the few people I know who really understands what is going on. She has an M.A. in International Relations and is used to working with big organizations from USIA to the Navy. In short, she always knows her brief.
Community. I live in a municipality which brings a lot of institutional advantages. Ilaya organizes a civic association which cannot rely on staff or taxes to help out. Nevertheless, she has made the East Bethesda Civic Association an effective advocate for her community. She has done this even though the neighborhood often has diverse and conflicting interests. No mean feat.
Listening and Respect. Anyone who has been an elected official knows that you need to spend more time hearing from people than talking. This is especially true on the Planning Board where one spends about one minute talking for every hundred minutes of listening to others. Ilaya not only understands how to listen but is actually good at hearing people. She can hear all sides and help bring people together. Knowing how to disagree without being disagreeable is a rare skill and especially useful in Planning.
Independence, Integrity, and Judgment. One might assume that I always agree with Ilaya though that's not the case. She thinks through the issues carefully and independently and forms her own opinion, having listened to all views and the evidence. I don't think I've met many people with the ability to take their own stand and defend it well. Equally important, she knows how to respect the professionals who work for the Board yet also ask the tough questions. Even when I don't agree with Ilaya, I have to respect her opinion and the thought behind it. The Planning Board Staff and County residents will value her approach.
In sum, with no denigration meant to other candidates, the Council can't go wrong if it appoints Ilaya. Will she make mistakes? Yeah, sure. We all do. I also think hers is a rare talent it'd be a shame to miss.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Planning Board WANTS YOU!
You are invited to participate in an exciting environmental planning project – jointly sponsored by the Montgomery County Planning Board and the County Executive. Called the Healthy and Sustainable Communities initiative, county staff will be crafting environmental policy goals and indicators that measure our progress – with your help! While county environmental programs do a great deal toward improving quality of life in Montgomery County, County Executive Ike Leggett and Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson have identified a missing link: a set of goals and corresponding measures of progress to guide decision making.
Join us at our kick-off workshop June 25-26 at the Universities at Shady Grove. At the workshop, we want participants like you to help us chart our progress toward meeting sustainability goals. RSVPView draft schedule of events
We've kicked off our project as a virtual document. Give us your feedback on how we should measure our environmental progress, even if you can't join us at the workshop. Log on to contribute your thoughts to any of the following indicator reports. Simply click on a goal and enter your comments. Visit often to view what others say. And please spread the word!
1. Climate protection
a. Energy use
b. Carbon emissions
c. Waste management
2. Clean air
Air quality index b. Travel indicators
3. Clean water
4. Wildlife habitat and open space
7. Green economy
a. Jobs
b. Agriculture
Thursday, May 22, 2008
TO PLAN - or not to plan?
By Sharon Dooley. Ms Dooley is the legislative Director of Upcounty Action and is looking closely at the selection process here.
The new line up of planning board interviewees shows a diversity of ideas, sexes, races and planning orientations. The council has whittled the original list of 29 – down to a round dozen. One (Wendell Holloway) has already withdrawn his name, but the others wait their turn for public and -council - scrutiny. It appears that each applicant has been an active participant in the concerns of this county for many years; in this we are fortunate.
The county, in my opinion, has an opportunity to take a giant step into an innovative future if it takes the bold leap forward that some of these applicants might provide. Few are professional planners, many are citizen activists, and more than a few are lawyers. Five are women, only two are Republicans (the board make up must include one Republican and one non Republican to balance the vacancies for the commissioners by party). I think, although I am not absolutely positive - as I could not find photos of each applicant, that three are African Americans (the soon to be open seat is currently held by an African American – Alistair Bryant). There appear to be neither Hispanic nor, Asian contenders for these positions.
Fewer members of this group are tied tightly to developers, few are known as environmentalists, one has been with the Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC), and a others have worked for local organizations, such as the WSSC, the PG Parks and Planning Board and Montgomery County Planning Board and the Smart Growth concept. Another is known as a developer, but he is linked with the new urbanism concept, which is conserving of urban areas, encouraging of the streetscape model and green spaces.
I think that there are great opportunities to find commissioners that will step up to the plate here and be ready to start without a steep learning curve. That should be one of the criteria, I think. We have for too long only looked at re-cycling residents from one agency to another in this county, and I am reluctant to advocate this narrowing of our scope. In a county of almost one million residents, we should look for diversity of ideas as well as gender and race.
I encourage the council to ask the tough questions about the future as they proceed with these interviews:
· What is their vision for the 21st Century in the county?
· What will they sacrifice to save our forests and agricultural reserve?
· How much density is tolerable; how much gridlock can we bear before insanity sets in?
· When will we create a real plan for affordable housing that offers more than a few hundred options each year? (We are currently more than ten years in arrears from previous schemes.)
· When will we seriously look at transit and create a realistic plan that funds it instead of more roads?
· What are their ideas for keeping clean air, increasing the green buildings in the county and reducing our dependence on traditional fuel sources in buildings here?
· When will the council ask more of the planners? Master plans are a way of life here – how can they be kept from becoming routine rote reviews that are retooled every twenty years or so? Hopefully, this new commission will deep six the mini-masters that were proposed as a way to circumvent the current schedules.
· When will the planning board step up itself to direct staff to create traffic studies and capacity measures that adequately address these issues using national norms and standards?
For quite a while Montgomery county planners have rested on their laurels using the standards that they set in place a generation ago. Quite properly, the county received many honors for these innovative practices; but in my opinion we have stagnated, while other parts of the country have taken our initial ideas and brought them to new levels and tried pilots with citizen input, development, housing and transit that we are not even considering. The cities of Portland and Minneapolis are among the new leaders in urban development. We have an opportunity to send a strong signal by starting down new paths and opening new doors – let’s take them and move toward real innovation and increased integrity in our planning process by selecting new commissioners who have a vision for tomorrow and for the tomorrows future generations can enjoy.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Legacy Open Space and the Twinbrook Sector Plan
The Planning Board has posted its revised agenda for its November 15th meeting.
At 7PM, a public hearing is scheduled on revisions to the Twinbrook Sector Plan. The major proposed revision is a mixed-use community called the Avalon by the Twinbrook Metro Station. The written submissions received so far by the Planning Board do not indicate major objections to the proposed change.
At 1PM, Legacy Open Space Director Brenda Sandberg will present her recommendations on the Legacy Open Space program. The program makes properties eligible for purchase should they come on the market. It does not commit the County to purchasing the properties (and certainly does not initiate any sort of condemnation proceeding or force a sale) though it does make them eligible for purchase through the Legacy Open Space program if they come on the market. Sandberg is recommending seven new sites for the Legacy Open Space program:
1) Beverly Property, Broad Run Watershed, Poolesville
2) Wild Acres/Grosvenor Mansion Property, Bethesda
3) Milton Property, Capitol View Park
4) Hickey and Offut, Bethesda
5) Ireland Drive/National Park Seminary Carriage Trails, Silver Spring
6) National 4H Council Headquarters, Chevy Chase
7) Montgomery College of Art and Design, Wheaton
Sandberg is also recommending against Legacy Open Space designation for several sites:
8) Selden Island/Walker Village Site
9) Edson Lane Forest
10) Woodmont East Phase II
The negative decision on Edson Lane Forest includes a rather passionate set of paragraphs calling for preservation of the forest and relocation of a proposed workforce housing project to another location in the same general area. Yet the memo to the Board also states:
Despite the value of retaining forest in urban areas, staff does not believe this site meets the overall Legacy Open Space criteria of “best of the best”. In addition, the isolated site is not appropriate for park ownership due to use and management concerns.More detail would help justify these statements. As written, they appear idiosyncratic and vague.
Here is what the memo to the Planning Board states on Woodmont East:
A nomination was very recently received for the Woodmont East development site in downtown Bethesda. The site is at the corner of Bethesda and Woodmont Avenues and the Capital Crescent Trail runs through the site, making the site a potentially important urban open space. An initial evaluation of the site was included in the staff memo on the Preliminary Plan/Development Plan that was reviewed by the Planning Board on November 8, 2007. That Preliminary/Development Plan was deferred at the request of the applicant. Legacy Open Space staff will continue to review the application and bring a staff recommendation to the Planning Board in the future, as appropriate.I was pleasantly surprised to read that staff will continue to review the application for LOS since Brenda Sandberg was the most emphatic in her opposition to open space at this site in my meeting with her and other members of planning staff. She insisted it would have to be entirely hardscape with some plantings, though it appears that this decision is being revisited as well in favor of a more sensible view of a mix of hard surface paths around and among green spaces and plantings.
The Board may want to question Sandberg about the LOS process. Before recommending against LOS for Woodmont East, Sandberg met with developers and planning staffers who had already recommended approval of the preliminary plan (which the developers ultimately withdrew under pressure from the Planning Board) but not with members of the community. The staff of the LOS program was under unreasonable pressure to produce a decision quickly--in less than eight days I am told even though the developers had requested an extension which had two more months to run.
It strikes me that this matter was badly handled and the process should be reformed to be more inclusive of the community. Placing blame is far less important than fixing the process so that community trust, already badly shaken, can be restored. After the staff presents its report on LOS, members of the public can testify and should do so to encourage reform in this area. Again, the problem may be not so much with the ultimate decisions but with a process which undermines confidence in them.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Gazette on Planning Board Meeting
Someone at the Gazette must have thought my remark at the Planning Board Forum on growth policy in Montgomery County was pretty snappy; they made it their lead quote in their article about the meeting:
The County Council needs to make more realistic decisions in forming its policy that guides and limits growth in Montgomery, residents said at a public forum Saturday at the county Planning Board’s offices in Silver Spring.I confess to wishing the second quote had been more coherent but I hope the gist of the idea was clear.
‘‘Building a whimsical bench by a bus stop does not mitigate traffic,” said David Lublin of Chevy Chase.‘‘Let’s stick to the plan ... not allow these little fudge factors that allow the plan to become eight times larger than the plan says,” said Lublin, who was among about 100 residents and others with interests in development at the meeting.
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