NO GO to PAY AND GO
In one of the worst public policy decisions in the history of this, or any County Council I can remember, a slim majority is gutting the very heart of the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance. Communities already reeling under the impact of excessive growth that came without roads, parks and schools can look forward to new levels of disruption. Developers will no longer have to wait for the infrastructure to be built, they won't even have to wait to see the necessary project appear in the capital budget. Instead, if they are willing to fork over a fraction of what they would have had to pay under the current rules, they can forward with new projects regardless of the whether there are roads, schools, and parks to support them. All that and the taxpayers get the additional bill.
As part of the Annual Growth Policy (the AGP) it raises the question of why even bother to have a policy. The AGP is supposed to tie permitted growth to existing or planned (and budgeted) public facilities. If projects proposals result in over-crowded roads and schools, they are not permitted. Ceilings on development are meant to allow only what the infrastructure can handle. As bad as things have gotten in many areas of the County, so bad in places that moratoria on development are in place, the AGP provided an outer limit to how out of control things could get. Now, for the next four years, the Council proposes to abdicate virtually any control and any responsibility for providing those things that make communities livable.
- It in no way guarantees that road improvements will
be put in place in time to handle the new development. In
fact, it doesn't guarantee that the County will ever get
enough capital to undertake the required road
improvements at all because projects could be scattered
through an impacted area, yet be so disconnected from
each other that the individual contributions don't yield
enough capital to build the roads. It could be a long
time before enough projects are put on the table to
generate the needed capital to make the major
improvements that are required. In the meantime the
County would (as Bill Hussman, head of Park and Planning
pointed out) have two choices: foot the bill for all the
related improvements to insure that the roads work, or
simply do nothing and create more intolerable conditions.
And the taxpayers get the choice of higher taxes, or
gridlocked roadways
- The level of funding is a joke. It does not and will
not cover costs for roads, parks, and other
infrastructure and it will force the rest of the tax
payers to pick up the bill. It reduces the requirements
on developers that currently exist, as minimal as they
are. It means that a developer who had a project approved
last week, last month, last April can come back in for a
reapproval, get the same number of lots, create all the
same problems and shift the bulk of the financial
responsibility on to the County. As this is being pushed
to "jump start" development, claims that developers might
have to meet new environmental conditions should be taken
with a grain of salt.
- It continues County policy of ignoring the impact on
schools - it requires zero funding for schools. We are
struggling with over-crowded class rooms already, and the
County is ready to adopt a policy that will make it
worse. One can only conclude that the supporting
councilmembers will continue past practice of increasing
class size under the adequate public facilities (APF)
requirements so that unacceptable overcrowding is
redefined as acceptable. Most neighborhoods and PTA's are
fed up with this approach by which APF requirements are
constantly loosened to facilitate developers, whether it
be the lowering of traffic standards or the raising of
class sizes. Pay-Go absent school funding is a travesty.
It implies that developers have made the necessary
contribution to insure that public facilities, yet it
ignores completely that most important public facility,
our schools.
- We have a four year capital budget that details road
improvements over that time. Most people agree we have a
backlog of worthy projects, that if we had the money,
we'd be doing more, not less over the next four years.
But with this proposal, developers create new claims on
our limited dollars. The infrastructure needs that Pay-Go
development creates does not have to be in the existing
four year plan. To accommodate these developers, the
County will have to bump projects that are in the plan to
make room for Pay-Go roads, or it can leave them out
meaning that whatever mess they create won't get cleaned
up for at least five years. What is the justice to
neighborhoods and communities that have sat in line long
enough to have existing problems addressed? Why open the
door to a host of new problems when we're struggling to
manage what's on our plate already. This proposal is
nothing more than a complete surrender to the development
community and a betrayal of existing communities that
have waited long enough to have their problems fixed.
- This proposal will overcrowd mature areas while opening the wedge to massive development. It puts development in the green wedge where the land is cheapest but also where our infrastructure is thinnest and therefore most costly to extend. We should be focusing development into the corridor cities that can most easily be served by mass transit and which are aligned with the future job centers that are planned for the I 270 corridor. Have we learned so little from the last 20 years that we don't see the foolishness of putting jobs in one place (the tech corridor), while focusing home construction in the wedge? Why are we still bent on planning that maximizes infrastructure costs and environmental degradation and that forgoes a logical plan that links housing and job centers in a way that saves both dollars and the environment.
We are not in a place to adopt Pay-Go. We have not met our existing infrastructure needs. We have too many overcrowded school rooms. We do not have adequate funding in place that would even let us say when these problems will be solved. Pay-Go solves nothing save to assuage developer impatience, while further insulating them from requirements that their projects not have a negative impact on existing communities, let alone on the County's budget.
Supporters of Pay-Go say that we have to jump start development, but that supposes that its dead. There are housing projects going up everywhere. Major undertakings are planned along I-270 and there are residential projects even in the wedge area being built right now. After a decade of over-building, after the Recession and after the shrinking of the Federal government it is no surprise that construction of commercial office space has slowed. But so what if we're not growing as fast as Fairfax, that doesn't prove, or disprove anything. Who ever said that paving over the County and turning it into an endless parking lot was how Montgomery County saw it's future. We had better growth policies, we put a higher value on the environment, and we have, I believe, a better place to live. If we're going to grow, we have a right to grow sensibly. We have a right to ask how much, how far and why. Growth is not the end purpose of public policy, building a viable community is that purpose. Growth needs to be made to serve the community and not the other way around. Pay-Go fails the building a better community test. It worsens roads, worsens schools, ignores planning principles and objectives, and its a flat out give away to developers at the expense of middle class homeowners. We need to say no go to Pay Go.
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