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We are lobbying against the proposal of Global Mission Church to build a facility just across the county line in Frederick County that will have a serious deleterious environmental impact on the county's Agricultural Reserve. On October 14, 2009, the Frederick County Planning Commission disapproved the project. The church is appealing the denial.
We have taken part in e-mail and letter campaigns against proposed new developments in Clarksburg and a large county bus depot that threatens what is left of the 10 Mile Creek watershed. The Planning Board urged the Council to find another site for the bus depot and delayed approval for nearly 1,600 new homes.
In April 2010, we reviewed plans and testified to present our views on the final Gaithersburg West Compromise Master Plan. That month, County Council unanimously approved a changed Master Plan for the Life Sciences Center area, the major part of the Gaithersburg West master plan. The final compromise plan will still produce one of the largest employment centers in the County where none had existed before.
Sierra Club advocacy greatly improved the staging requirements of the Germantown Master Plan—the requirements that condition development on the provision of public facilities. Although this was advertised as a smart growth plan, the staging was based on road, not transit, construction.
As part of the regional Sustainable Metro DC, in April 2010 we supported continued capital funding for Metro and fought against crippling service cuts alongside major fare increases.
An outdated county zoning law requires excessive construction of parking spaces in new developments around Metro stations. At the same time, County planners proposed requiring that Twinbrook developers purchase "Transferable Development Rights" (TDRs) from property owners in the Agriculture Reserve if they wanted to build higher-density projects around Twinbrook metro. The sale of TDRs compensates rural property owners for the restrictions the County has placed on development in the Agricultural Reserve. Developers argued that the cost of buying TDRs would ruin the economics of their projects.
Sierra Club analyzed the cost of building garage parking versus the cost of buying TDRs and showed lawmakers that the money saved by reducing parking requirements would be greater than the cost of TDRs. The County Council adopted this strategy—less required parking, more TDR purchases—for the Twinbrook master plan.
Jobs and prosperity are drawn to the western part of the DC region along with sprawl and clogged roads leaving the eastern part underdeveloped. The Sierra Club's Sustainable Metro DC Campaign has announced the "Uniting a Region Divided" initiative to draw attention to the problem and search for solutions. We suppoort Governor O'Malley's Trainsit Oriented Development initiative, particularly development around transit stations.
