Industrial development fears loom large over Webb Tract

Village residents see the county operations that could move to empty plot off Snouffer School Road

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Kevin Linton of the county’s liquor control department talks with Terry O’Grady of Montgomery Village about the department’s truck fleet during a Monday tour at a county service depot in Shady Grove.

At each of the stops of the Monday morning tour, O’Grady, two fellow Montgomery Village residents and a Montgomery Village Foundation community manager asked for employee and vehicle counts, trying to get a sense of potential impact on the residential roads surrounding the Webb Tract, a 134-acre plot near Montgomery Village.

Several of the operations could move to make room to redevelop the service park as part of the county’s plan to redevelop 2,000 acres around the Shady Grove Metro Station into a commercial and residential haven.

While the operations were well-managed and surprisingly clean, O’Grady said, the tour did not allay her concerns about clogged, unsafe roads, noise and the impact on health and the environment the relocation would cause.

‘‘I thought it was overwhelming,” she said. ‘‘For this to sit in a residential community made me think. I just can’t imagine this going in [to the Webb Tract]. It is just so much.”

O’Grady, president of the East Village Homes Corp. and founding member of the Mid-County Citizens Alliance, has fought for more than a year the relocation of several of the county operations.

For most at that time, the Webb Tract has been the leading candidate to take the county buildings. It was already zoned for industrial use and the developer, Miller and Smith, was interested in building the facilities and giving the land and the buildings to the county at no cost, in exchange for redevelop rights at Shady Grove.

Fear over the move eased in January, when the County Council, after several postponements and much public outcry, promised not to put a 400-bus school bus depot on the Webb Tract.

O’Grady knows that elections in November could change all that.

‘‘Nothing is written in stone and everything can be changed,” she said. ‘‘We have to be sure we stay on top of it.”

So the tour was an important part of understanding the scope of the county operations that could still move to the Webb Tract, which include the county’s liquor control warehouse, a school maintenance building and a maintenance operation for the county Planning Board’s fleet of vehicle.

A key point of frustration for O’Grady and Roy Bevington, an East Village resident also on the tour, has been that they have been unable to obtain official counts of the number of vehicles coming into and going out of the service park. County officials giving the tour, Janice Turpin and Lisa Rother, said they would get the numbers.

The county has been trying attract developers in addition to Miller and Smith, said Rother, who works for County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D). She also hopes to get the official ‘‘Request for Expressions of Interest” out to developers in the coming weeks.

O’Grady’s gripe with the Shady Grove plan is less with the ‘‘Smart Growth” logic behind redeveloping areas around mass transit, and more that there is a double-standard in doing so at the potential cost to the quality of life for residents around the Webb Tract.

‘‘The county wants to make Shady Grove a very vibrant community,” she said. ‘‘Well, we want the same thing.”