Remarks by Council President George Leventhal on Status of Council Response to Problems in the Clarksburg Town Center

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Last summer, the Montgomery County Council agreed to an action plan for dealing with the process of restoring the credibility of and confidence in our county government’s processes for regulating development. We said there are significant problems in Clarksburg, and we must find out what went wrong and why, and come up with comprehensive solutions to the problems.

Between then and now, we have expended countless hours toward that end in a multiphase effort.

We assigned to our independent Office of Legislative Oversight the formidable task of examining what went wrong and why in the Clarksburg situation. They came through for us with an exhaustive report that identified weaknesses and lack of coordination in the processes of the Planning Board, the Department of Permitting Services, and the oversight by the Council. They identified the role of the private sector. And they provided us with a roadmap for restoring credibility to the regulation of growth by County government.

As we consider today how the Planning Board can approve and amend site plans in the County – a critical piece of the puzzle – I wish I could tell you that we are finished with the task. We are not. Much remains to be done.

The mediation between the developers and builders and the community in Clarksburg is ongoing and was recently extended to April 6. We still have to finalize where the responsibility for enforcing site plans lies. A permanent planning director has yet to be chosen. The Council will decide this summer who will chair the Planning Board for the next four years. Funding for the increased staffing and technology needed to implement improvements remains to be approved. The Inspector General continues his look at the situation.

To quote from Churchill after the Battle of Britain: “It’s not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

We all agreed last summer that a critical step in restoring public confidence in the planning process was to ensure that we take aggressive, appropriate measures in the short term that are useful and responsive to the problems. We also took care that the short term measures were proportionate, and not an overreaction to the problem. And we worked hard to minimize the collateral damage to innocent third parties.
What did we do? And I mean “we” in the collective sense…

• We instituted a countywide freeze of building permits and site plan amendments until we could verify height limits and setback requirements.
• We worked to identify the necessary provisions of the Clarksburg Town Center site plans pertaining to road and public safety infrastructure, including recommendations for guaranteeing that the necessary infrastructure is in place in a timely fashion.
• We reviewed site plans approved throughout Montgomery County after January 1, 2003 to make sure that work was being done in accordance with the specifications of the approved plans -- and suspended development in any site plan where violations were uncovered.
• We brought on additional expert help in the persons of Royce Hanson and Bob Kendal to assist, respectively, the Council and the Planning Board in pushing forward reforms.
• We asked for and received a comprehensive Management Improvement Plan from the Planning Board.
• We worked to ensure that mid-level Planning personnel could no longer approve so-called minor amendments to site plans.
• We required a staffing plan from the Department of Permitting Services and the Planning Board to increase the number of personnel dedicated to site plan and other enforcement duties.
• We have sought to strengthen citizen participation and involvement in the development approval process at every turn. No citizens’ group should ever again have to go through all that the Clarksburg Town Center Advisory Committee had to in order to get a fair shake for their community.
  

We have come a long way since last summer. We have done all this and more not to “put all this behind us” but rather because it is our responsibility to find out what went wrong, wrestle it to the ground, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s not the “blame game,” my friends, it’s the “responsibility” game.

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Release ID: 06-028
Media Contact: Patrick Lacefield 240-777-7939, Jean Arthur 240-777-7934