Nearly a year after a coalition of residents began asking county planners whether their alternative to the controversial proposal to build a 900-acre "Science City" between Gaithersburg and Rockville is viable, the answer has come back emphatically no.

The alternative proposed by Residents for Reasonable Development focuses growth in the eastern side of the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, clustered around three stations proposed for the Corridor Cities Transitway near Shady Grove Adventist Hospital and Johns Hopkins University's 38-acre campus.

RRD has grown into a loose alliance with transit advocates, environmentalists and kindred civic groups, succeeding in its campaign to focus attention on the side-effects of tripling development and jobs in the area — while drawing the sometimes pointed disdain of the county's business and biotech community. Signs bearing "Science: Yes. City: No" have become almost ubiquitous in yards across Gaithersburg, Rockville and North Potomac.

County planners discredited RRD's plan during a series of County Council work sessions last month on the Gaithersburg West Master Plan, the county's blueprint for growth in and around the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center. They told council members that restraining commercial growth in Gaithersburg West is untenable because it does not allow the square footage needed to boost CCT ridership enough to make the transit proposal competitive for federal funding.

Planners did not run new traffic and transit models using the specifics of RRD's plan. Instead, they equated the RRD plan with a low-threshold scenario they analyzed more than a year ago.

While both would allow about 13 million total square feet of commercial development, Gaithersburg resident Pamela Lindstrom, RRD's data-cruncher, insists that there are several differences that would impact transit ridership.

For one, the RRD plan proposes nearly three times more housing, roughly as much as the Planning Board's version of Gaithersburg West. Just as important, the RRD plan concentrates development at the transit stations.

The RRD plan would "essentially maintain the suburban industrial/office park character of the area," planning board staff wrote in an Oct. 19 memo to the County Council.

"It would make it even more difficult than it already is to overcome the mistake of the 1990 plan, which established a pattern of development that was already on the verge of being outmoded."

Supporters see the rebuttal as symptomatic of the dismissive attitude they say they've been treated with, and proof that county officials are determined to approve a plan with as much development as possible.

Being reasonable

RRD's "Scale It Back" signs dot yards along Muddy Branch Road and in North Potomac off Darnestown Road. The slogan stretches across a banner welcoming motorists to the Stonebridge community.

In a year, "Scale It Back" has become a mantra for hundreds of residents who insist they are not trying to stymie progress, but rather ensure that Science City doesn't spiral out of control.

Johns Hopkins University wants to build a 6.5 million-square-foot biotech campus on the 107-acre Belward farm off Muddy Branch and Darnestown roads, laid out in towers at least 12 stories tall that would hold more than 15,000 workers.

Critics of the Planning Board's version of Gaithersburg West say its recommendation for 4.5 million square feet on Belward is more than twice as much as the parcel can handle and they suspect that, in the end, Belward will amount to a commercial real estate venture for Johns Hopkins.

"It's a mirage," said RRD member David Rothbard, who lives north of Belward up Darnestown Road. "People think this is going to be Silicon Valley when it's going to be a lot of other sort of development and not necessarily a lot of [research and development]."

For Westleigh resident Donna Baron, the crusade against Science City started with a letter to the County Council last year that soon morphed into the Gaithersburg-Rockville-North Potomac Coalition. She launched www.scale-it-back.com this summer. The site has drawn about 15,000 page views and its petition opposing Science City has more than 450 signatures from residents of 67 subdivisions around the county.

"There has been a lot of very inflated marketing rhetoric. If people have heard that, it sounds wonderful; they're going to come in, they're going to cure cancer, right off the bat — and without creating any traffic," Baron said.

What's next

Hopkins has been rallying support from the business, biotech and political community. Their vision centers around boosting "translational research" in the Life Sciences Center — getting research breakthroughs linked with venture capitalists and to the market in time frames of several months rather than a decade or more.

Hopkins is lining up "angel investors" as they await the report expected this month from the county's Bioscience Task Force and is negotiating a "memorandum of understanding" with the county.

Hopkins officials say they regularly hear from nearby residents who support the vision but feel intimidated by their neighbors.

"This is a master plan, not an application for a building permit," said David McDonough, senior director of development oversight for Johns Hopkins Real Estate. "They're saying the sky is falling. It's not reality-based."

Such statements have angered the plan's critics. As much as 2 million square feet can be built without any new approvals, plus Hopkins wants to break ground at Belward within two years.

"That argument ‘Well, don't worry about it now because you'll be dead by the time this whole thing comes to fruition' — that doesn't even hold water because you're going to have that congestion before 2020 and 2030," said North Potomac resident Bragi Valgeirsson, a close collaborator with Baron.

In the long run, they say they will stay vigilant as Science City take shape.

Opponents are waiting for the decision that matters most: the County Council's version of Gaithersburg West, which they expect to make significant concessions to their concerns.

"There have been so many people in our area who have said, ‘If this goes through, I will move,'" Baron said. "... Some of them are ready to put their houses on the market now, and I keep saying ‘Just wait, just wait — it might get better.'"