Brookeville Road businesses that could be impacted by Greater Lyttonsville sector plan |
One indication of the frustration with County elected officials was activist and attorney Robin Ficker collecting a bounty of new signatures for his term-limits initiative. Ficker believes he will come in with more than the 10,000 signatures required for term limits to be placed on the ballot for voter approval or rejection. If approved by voters, Councilmembers Roger Berliner, Marc Elrich, Nancy Floreen and George Leventhal would be forced to step down in 2018, and could not run again for those seats for four years.
Two new websites are being launched in the effort at Westbard and countywide.
MCCPR.org is planned to be the hub of activism for a county-scale citizen operation to reform the planning process, and reduce the influence of development interests in County planning and politics. Currently, the Council receives more than 80% of its campaign contributions from developers and development attorneys, with the exception of Elrich, who accepts no funds from development interests.
Evidence emerged that the Council has actually been cynically crunching the voter numbers, and had concluded that the number of voters at Westbard alone could not boot them from office. That Machiavellian calculation emboldened them to unanimously pass the Westbard plan despite overwhelming community opposition and anger. With large, mobilized citizen groups now linking up, all bets are off for their reelection in 2018.
More specific to Westbard (but potentially duplicable in other areas facing sector plan rewrites), is a second site, PlanWestbard.org. Jack Lopez, a resident and professional urban planner, will head up the site. It will not only dive in-depth into the Westbard plans expected to be unveiled next week, but also present alternative concepts going forward.
Lopez says he will try to bring new tech innovations other jurisdictions and the private sector are using in planning to the analysis. Many of the methods currently used by the County to study traffic, for example, are vague, inaccurate, and incomplete.
Longtime County activist Stan Wiggins presented an analysis of the option to incorporate, which a majority of residents voted to explore back in April. It was hoped that an incorporated southwest Bethesda, or Lyttonsville, for example, would give local residents authority over land-use decisions like Rockville and Gaithersburg currently enjoy. Wiggins found that a new municipality's land-use authority would be retained by the County, unless a provision in the law was overridden by the state legislature. Given that many state-level office holders also receive hefty checks from the same developers, that is unlikely to happen.
This is just the beginning, as the large turnout at last night's meeting suggests.
How and where can we sign the term limit petition?
ReplyDeleteIf you contact Robin Ficker on Facebook, he can hook you up:
Deletehttps://www.facebook.com/robinficker
I love how out of one side of your mouth you talk about how great NoVa's growth is and out of the other you whine about how terrible MoCo is when it tries to encourage even a small fraction of that growth, themselves.
ReplyDeletenew NoVa buildings = "MoCo lags behind!"
new MoCo buildings = "MoCo is beholden to developers!"
And you wonder why people give you so much crap.
6:37: You're trying to compare residential buildings to office buildings and corporate headquarters. One is a bedroom community. The other is economic development. Big difference. Why should anyone be treated badly for speaking the truth?
DeleteSo you're against the thousands of residential units being built in NoVa, too? Congrats, that makes equally little sense.
Delete1:36: Residential housing is not economic development. No County in Maryland, even in rural areas, is having a problem getting developers to build housing. What we don't have in Montgomery County are large numbers of high-wage private sector jobs coming into the County.
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