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Little did county planners know that when a half acre of temporary artificial turf was removed from Silver Spring in 2008, residents would be outraged to suddenly find their downtown devoid of green space, fake or not.

Now those planners are resuming a project to identify areas for more green space in downtown Silver Spring and need developers, who have circumvented green-space requirements in the past, to comply.

"The sector plan has a goal of a green downtown," said John Marcolin, an urban designer for Silver Spring with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, referring to the Silver Spring Central Business District Sector Plan adopted in 2000. "But that theme hasn't really been fulfilled the way the plan anticipated."

Because of zoning allowing for greater densities, Silver Spring has many "optional method" developments, which require a developer to provide public amenities, like public green space, in exchange for building higher. But since that 2000 sector plan, those amenities haven't been very public and haven't been very green, Marcolin said.

"Developers will move the building back 10 or 20 feet and call it public-use space with a sidewalk and landscaping," Marcolin said in a phone interview Friday. "It doesn't appear to users as public, it just appears as a glorified front yard."

Also, many public-use spaces aren't green space, they are "urban plazas," areas that are more than 50 percent paved, like the fountain at Silver Plaza on Ellsworth Drive, Marcolin said. "Green space" must be more than 50 percent grass or a soft surface, according to Park and Planning criteria. Another trend over the past decade is developers fulfilling their minimum requirement through bits and pieces of public use space, rather than larger parcels that are actually usable by the community, said Sandra Pereira, a senior planner with Park and Planning.

There are 17.2 acres of public green space existing or approved in the Silver Spring Central Business Space, but much of that is the 14.5-acre Jesup Blair Park in south Silver Spring, according to Park and Planning statistics. Only 2.6 acres of existing or approved green space is provided by private developers, according to those statistics. At least 20 percent of the lot size for optional method developments must be public-use space.

So planners are resuming their Silver Spring Green Space Plan, which began in 2008 after the closing of the artificial turf field at Fenton Street and Ellsworth Drive. It had been postponed last year due to budget cuts. The turf had been installed in 2007 as a temporary stopgap until ground was broken on the Silver Spring Civic Building and Veteran's Plaza, now expected to open this summer.

"There was this huge community outcry against" closing the turf, Pereira said.

The green space plan has identified four initial sites where large, public green space is possible. The first priority, and also the space that could be implemented in the shortest amount of time, is Parking Lot 3 on Georgia Avenue between Thayer and Silver Spring Avenues. The lot is owned by the county but is also the proposed site of a massive mixed-use project, Studio Plaza, which would include 577 residential units, 61,000 square feet of retail and 175,000 square feet of office space. The project would also include a half-acre plaza near the center of the site.

Planners have worked with the developer, Robert Hillerson, to make that green space more accessible to residents of Fenton Village and east Silver Spring. With the construction of a new pedestrian linkage that will bisect the site from east to west, the green space will have access from all surrounding streets, Hillerson said.

But some residents from those neighborhoods have been critical of the project and its proposed green space, calling it a "gated community."

"The green space is not a public space, because it's hidden and it's not available to us," said Karen Roper of the East Silver Spring Citizens Association. "... It's only a half-acre. It's a back yard for those 600 units."

Other potential green space sites are the stream valley at the Falkland Chase apartments at 16th Avenue and East West Highway, parking lots on Georgia Avenue near Ripley Street and the parking lot at the Giant Foods on East West Highway. Green space at the latter site could be part of a previously-mentioned redesign or redevelopment of Blair Plaza with underground parking spaces and a large plot of green space on the existing surface lot outside Giant, Marcolin said.

But that is only a suggested redevelopment plan for the Blairs and wouldn't be pursued for at least another 15 years, said Marnie Abramson, a principal with Rockville-based Tower Companies, the developer of the Blairs.

"Long-term, we have the ability to develop more density on the site," said Abramson, noting that the renovation of units in the Blairs high-rise apartment buildings is Tower's only immediate priority. "At that point, we will go back with Park and Planning and look at a larger master plan with more green."

The other new green space sites aren't expected for at least a few years, but if the plan works, it could be applied to other central business districts in the county, Pereira said.

Planners said they won't engage in revisionist history and propose stricter mandates on green space requirements, all they can do now is encourage developers to "go green."

"The sector plan needed a little more specificity," Pereira said. "I don't want to say the zoning or optional method isn't stringent enough, I just want to say there is room for improvement.''