washingtonpost.com

Montgomery Alters Development Rules

By Matthew Mosk

A divided Montgomery County Council voted yesterday to impose Maryland's highest taxes on development, but coupled that decision with a move that will effectively lift a moratorium on building homes in some of the county's most congested areas.

The 6 to 3 vote ended more than a month of contentious debate over the county's growth policy, a complex document that establishes roughly how many residential units can be built in the county over the next two years.

Council member Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large), an architect of the new policy, said it was a balanced approach, raising about $44 million a year from developers to pay for classrooms and road improvements while granting them concessions they sought to make it easier to get projects approved for construction.

"The reality is, this is not a gift to the developers," he said. "This is a gesture to working families who want a place to live."

But a bloc of council members on the losing end of yesterday's vote said the new policy rewards developers and will leave the county with more traffic and school crowding. They said it recasts entirely the way Montgomery County handles development decisions, returning to something akin to the 1980s, when builders faced few impediments and put up 10,000 new homes a year.

The result, said council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg), is a policy that threatens to further strain the suburban county's already clogged roads and crowded classrooms.

"The council that was elected to end gridlock is going to make gridlock worse," he said. "It's indefensible."

Another sharp critic of the plan, council member Tom Perez (D-Silver Spring), predicted the decision would inflame slow-growth advocates, who already had questioned the role campaign donations from developers played in the council's decision. Development interests contributed $1.3 million to Montgomery County politicians in the 2002 elections.

About 40 of the most vocal critics of the new growth policy gathered outside the council chambers in Rockville after the vote, wearing fluorescent green and pink stickers on their chests that said, "Shame," and "We're Watching." Tina Brown, campaign director of the Washington-based group Solutions Not Sprawl, called the vote "shortsighted."

"They've let us down," she said.

Richard Parsons, president of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, said the protesters were mischaracterizing the outcome of the new policy, which he termed "a mixed bag."

"Having the highest impact taxes in the state is not going to help us keep business here," he said.

The impact taxes, initially proposed in the spring, wound up being the least contentious element of the growth policy agreement. The council voted to charge developers about $14,000 per unit , though the amount will vary depending on the location and type of housing built. The revenue -- an estimated $44 million a year -- will be dedicated to school construction and transportation needs.

The deepest division was over a proposal to rewrite the standards that planners will use to determine whether an area is so saturated with vehicles and schoolchildren that it no longer can accommodate new subdivisions.

The council agreed to tighten the "schools test," which had been riddled with loopholes, as a way to prevent construction in areas where schools are already crowded. But they eliminated "policy area review," which used formulas to determine whether certain communities are too overwhelmed by traffic to sustain new housing.

That decision will effectively lift the construction bans that have long been in place in several neighborhoods, including Aspen Hill, Clarksburg, Olney, Montgomery Village and Fairland/White Oak.

Council member Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County) said elimination of that test was "a gift for developers and a booby prize for our residents. It's no longer a growth policy. It's just growth."

Council member Nancy Floreen (D-At Large) disagreed, saying the decision to give some leeway to developers was a "real world" solution. Likewise, County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) said the council did what was "necessary."

"We need money to pay for school classrooms and for transportation," Duncan said. "This will help us do that.".

Council President Michael L. Subin (D-At Large) defended the final policy as a suitable compromise.

"I know there were folks on both sides who will ascribe negative motives to the council," he said. "I just don't give any credence to that."