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Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett has agreed on a $46 million price tag for the 130-acre Webb Tract near Montgomery Village, where he wants the county to build four major facilities in the next several years.

And after a year of waiting for final designs, neighbors to the Webb Tract have rallied into a multi-neighborhood coalition in the hopes of presenting a united front against the plan.

Under Leggett's proposal, the vacant plot next to the Montgomery County Airpark would become home to the police and fire rescue training academy, the county parks department's maintenance depot, and the county school system's food distribution warehouse and its building maintenance facility.

The Webb Tract is the fourth of five land purchases that lay at the core of Leggett's "Smart Growth Initiative," which relocates more than a dozen county operations while clearing the way for a pair of multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar redevelopments around Shady Grove.

The frustration of the Webb Tract's thousands of neighbors — in East Village, Hunters Woods, Hadley Farms and Flower Hill — flared last month after Leggett (D) added the two maintenance facilities and piqued last week in a series of heated meetings. That gave rise to the coalition, which is made up of representatives from the Montgomery Village Foundation, East Village, Hunters Woods, Flower Hill and the Midcounty Citizens Alliance.

On Monday night, the coalition agreed that the county's plan for the Webb Tract is incompatible with its residential surroundings.

"It is in the public interest to protect the character and stability of our residential neighborhoods from incompatible land uses and associated activities," according to a draft letter to county officials.

The group will send the statement to community groups and formalize their position April 27, said Bob Hydorn, president of the Montgomery Village Foundation's board of directors.

The community anger boiled at a forum April 1, where more than 50 residents assailed county officials with pointed questions and criticism.

Residents agonized over the noise from the PSTA's driving track and smoke from its "burn building" and were certain that the plan would make Snouffer School Road, the Webb Tract's only access point, even less safe.

Officials pointed to studies showing that the PSTA and food warehouse would create half as much traffic as the Webb Tract's approved preliminary plan, which allows up to 1.2 million square feet of "light industrial" uses in 23 warehouses, and promised to do a new traffic and noise study based on all four facilities. They said the county may also build the food warehouse on the east side of the Webb Tract — allowing the PSTA to shift from East Village and Snouffer School Road.

That did little to soothe residents, several of whom said they have been fighting off proposals for the Webb Tract for more than a decade.

"You're doing this for Smart Growth or whatever, but you're really just moving traffic around and dumping this in our backyard," said East Village resident Greg Doyle-Wandell. "You are ruining this neighborhood for generations."

Flap over funding

If all goes as projected, Leggett's plan would cover $530 million in expenses with $580 in land sale revenue and lease savings.

But as funding decisions head to the County Council in the next two months, some members are not sold, especially on the need to borrow about $140 million over the next three years.

"Virtually everyone is scaling back on using these things, and we're going to use them to the tune of a few hundred million dollars," said Councilman Michael J. Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown.

Knapp and Council President Philip M. Andrews (D-Dist. 3) of Gaithersburg have yet to be convinced that the 36-year-old PSTA should not be renovated at its current site between Gaithersburg and Rockville, at Great Seneca Highway and Route 28. While Leggett envisions the 52 acres providing the housing critical to the massive plan to quadruple the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, Andrews and Knapp point out that the PSTA's $24.9 million upgrade is already budgeted and can happen right away.

Documents and maps on the "Smart Growth Initiative" are

available at www.montgomery

countymd.gov/propertyuse.