Members of the Montgomery County Planning Board are questioning the county’s plans to construct a public parking garage on Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring and intend to tell County Executive Marc Elrich about their concerns.
“This is an opportunity site a quarter mile from transit, highly valuable, [a] perfect place to put housing,” Commissioner Josh Linden said during the board’s July 25 discussion of the county’s plans to build the garage. “If you’re going to activate this neighborhood, you’re going to activate it with people. You’re not going to activate it with cars.”
The plans, submitted as a mandatory referral by the county Department of Transportation, propose the construction of a public garage at 8615 Georgia Ave. with 675 parking spaces and 3,000 square feet of ground-floor space intended for retail and commercial use. Currently, the site is a surface parking lot and loading alley for surrounding offices and businesses.
Mandatory referrals are plans that are submitted by government entities for any type of land acquisition, sale, use or development activity, according to Montgomery Planning. The board reviews plans on an advisory basis and can deny a project or approve it with or without comments.
The project is part of a partnership between the county and United Therapeutics Corp. that also would transfer county ownership of the 1,344-space Spring Cameron Garage at 8700 Cameron St. to the biotechnology company whose headquarters are at 1000 Spring St. Through the land-transfer deal, United Therapeutics expects to expand its footprint in downtown Silver Spring by 40% and build a facility that could realize the company’s goal of manufacturing transplant organs, according to a December county press release announcing the partnership.
Under the agreement, United Therapeutics will construct a public parking garage at the site on Georgia Avenue. The company also will provide funding to the county to build a new fiber hub and relocate the county transportation department to a renovated facility at 9150 Brookville Road in Silver Spring, the release said.
The county’s fiber hub is currently located in the Spring Cameron Garage and would need to be replaced. At the July 25 meeting, the board reviewed mandatory referral plans to redevelop a parking lot next to Fairview Road Urban Park to build the new hub.
Once the garage is complete, United Therapeutics is expected to transfer the site to the county. In return, the county will transfer ownership of the Spring Cameron Garage to the biotech company, according to the release. Another term of the agreement requires United Therapeutics to invest at least $50 million in any new facility on the site within 15 years of the ownership transfer, the release states.
While housing is not part of the county’s mandatory referral plans, Montgomery Planning staff have recommended the garage be structurally designed to accommodate future housing development, planning documents state. In the December press release, county officials said the garage site would include a “parcel designated for a future affordable housing development.”
Upon hearing a presentation of the project plans, board members expressed frustration that housing construction was not a key element of the proposal and agreed to send a letter to Elrich outlining their concerns.
“The problem isn’t that it’s not a nice garage, it’s that it’s a garage,” Commissioner James Hedrick said at the meeting.
Planning Board Chair Artie Harris noted the location of the garage is close to the Silver Spring Transit Center Station on the corner of Wayne and Colesville roads and in an “optimal location for housing.” Commissioner Shawn Bartley echoed his colleagues’ frustration with the plan and said the project lacked the amount of commercial space that’s available at the public garage on Ellsworth Place facing Veterans Plaza and was not “ambitious” in housing as well.
Elrich told MoCo360 on Thursday the county tried to negotiate with the property owners of the proposed site for the new garage, Silver Spring-based Lee Development Group, to allow the county to build housing at the site.
“We asked, we pushed, we didn’t give up easily, but at the end of the day, they said, ‘No housing.’ … And that’s where we got stuck,” Elrich said. “We didn’t do this willfully.”
He added that without the Georgia Avenue site, the county’s partnership with United Therapeutics could have fallen through.
“I wasn’t going to blow up a deal like this over that,” Elrich said. “We’ll get what housing we can get.”
Jeremy Souders, acting division chief of the transportation department parking, also told the board at the meeting that the county has the “intention to have affordable housing” at the Georgia Avenue site.
He said the county plans to build housing on a smaller surface lot on the eastern portion of the site and will request development proposals once the county takes possession of the garage.
According to planning documents, the board approved in 2010 plans that proposed a three-story music hall, a 12-story office building and a 14-story hotel with structured parking at the Georgia Avenue site. Only the music hall, known as The Fillmore Silver Spring, was constructed and the office building and hotel were never built.
In the end, board members approved the mandatory referral plans and transmitted their comments to the county’s transportation department.
Harris said he wanted United Therapeutics’ expansion projects to move forward, “but we also want to explain to others” that the board was concerned about housing.
According to the plans, the Georgia Avenue garage would include a green roof or solar panels and decorative fins on the façade to provide screening of the parking.