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The first public hearing on the county's blueprint for quadrupling development at the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center is set for March 26, putting the County Council's approval of the Gaithersburg West master plan on a timeline to coincide with the state's decision on shifting the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway further into the 800-acre area.

The county Planning Board intends to follow the public hearing with work sessions in late April on each of the five districts that make up the plan before handing it off to County Executive Isiah Leggett, who would then give it to the County Council for final approval, said planning Chairman Royce Hanson. Planning staff have been discussing Gaithersburg West with Leggett every three weeks, where he has promised to push his approval through to the County Council faster than the usual 60 days.

In a statement, Leggett posed the master plan as essential to the county's future.

"[W]e must be poised to protect and advance the investments we have made so that we retain and grow the job opportunities that we have created," he wrote in the Feb. 11 statement. "… This Plan reflects important policy priorities for our community of tomorrow by incorporating principles of smart growth and transit-oriented development; creation of jobs; protection of our agricultural reserve; and advancement of biosciences and technology — principles that are vital to the County to continue to flourish during the planning period of the next two decades. It is important that we get it right, and that means approving a master plan that is not only consistent with decades of previous planning, but that is of sufficient scope to accomplish our vision over the next two decades."

Today's Life Sciences Center sits on about 500 acres west of Interstate 270, between Gaithersburg and Rockville, with about 7 million square feet of research and office space hosting more than 21,000 jobs supported by 3,300 residences. The first draft of Gaithersburg West, made public Feb. 6, calls for 15 million square feet of new research and commercial development, 5,000 new homes and 40,000 new jobs to be clustered around the Corridor Cities Transitway, a proposed light rail or rapid bus line that would connect the Shady Grove Metro station with Clarksburg. The CCT's current alignment has one stop just inside the Life Sciences Center's northern edge; Gaithersburg West calls for three stops.

"It has to be made very clear that the Corridor Cities Transitway has to be there for this to happen," commissioner Jean Cryor said Thursday. "… This is essential, and it's more essential than in any other place that we've been working on."

Hotly debated for more than a year, the Gaithersburg West master plan has stoked the highest hopes of the county's business and biotech community — including Johns Hopkins University, Adventist HealthCare, the Gaithersburg-Germantown Chamber of Commerce and dozens of biotech ventures — and won the backing of elected officials, especially Leggett (D). The immensity of that vision has also stirred worry among Gaithersburg, North Potomac and Rockville residents who want county leaders to scale the plan back.

Members of the planning board acknowledged the heavy interest Thursday but decided to hold off on substantive discussion until the hearing and work sessions. With so much input already, Cryor asked planners to be ready to address the litany of residents' concerns.

"I want to be sure that when we have our public [hearing] that we have an opportunity to have answers for those questions; that we don't take them as new questions, [that] we take them as questions that are on the record and that we have responses to them," she said.

Some of those answers will start to take shape when planners unveil Gaithersburg West's "design guidelines" before the hearing, said planner Nancy Sturgeon, but the ultimate specifics will come only as property owners in the Life Sciences Center move forward with their long-term plans.

"This is going to take a long time," Sturgeon said. "I just want to make that clear; the build-out here could take 30 to 40 years."