The Montgomery County Planning Board on Thursday approved plans for a 168-unit townhouse community in the middle of a Bethesda office park, despite concerns from a leader of the local high school PTA.
Bethesda-based EYA wants to build the project in an area ofRock Spring Park that has been predominantly commercial office for a long time.
The 10-acre property is across Fernwood Road from the corporate headquarters of Marriott International and a short walk along Rockledge Drive to the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin. A building constructed for IBM in the 1960s sits just north of the site, an empty swath of land reserved for two more office buildings and a parking garage.
The Planning Board approved the project’s preliminary and site plans on Thursday. After the county finalized a master plan calling for a North Bethesda Bus Rapid Transitway in October, EYA worked with the Department of Transportation and is offering the county right-of-way along Fernwood Drive for a future BRT station. The North Bethesda Transitway would run bus rapid transit from White Flint to Westfield Montgomery mall.
Not far from the site is Walter Johnson High School, which is near capacity and projected to be over capacity by the 2017-2018 school year with no addition or modernization projects on the horizon.
Jennifer Cope, representing the Walter Johnson cluster of PTAs, told the Planning Board she saw a “major disconnect” in the county’s planning strategies and the approval of the EYA townhouse proposal. She also questioned how accurate the county’s school population projections are.
“Stop approving non-priority developments, especially those that are far from established rapid transit,” Cope said.
EYA will be required to pay a school facilities fee, which planning staff said will mean $2,000 per each unit, good for almost $400,000. The developer will also be required to pay an impact fee of $19,533 per unit, meaning another $3 million. EYA will not be required to make additional school facility payments at the middle school level, as first reported by planning staff.
The Board also approved variances to allow EYA to remove 10 specimen trees and provide what could end up being 32 fewer parking spaces than required. EYA has also arranged to provide 72 guest parking spaces in a nearby office building garage.
The inclusion of space for the county to build a future bus rapid transit facility wasn’t part of the original plan, said EYA Vice President McLean Quinn.
“This project seems at first pretty simple, but I can tell you over the last six months we’ve had a lot of meetings with staff and with DOT to come up with a plan to respond to the new transitway,” Quinn said.
Quinn also tried to convince the Board that the Rock Spring Park office complex isn’t as strange a place for residential development as it might seem. He pointed to nearby Westfield Montgomery mall and the Wildwood Shopping Center as activity areas.
“This really is a major center of activity in the county and we view this site as the hole in the doughnut,” Quinn told the Board.
Rendering via Montgomery County Planning Department
