Village golf course building plan dropped

Neighbors fought proposal for senior community

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

The developer IDI Group Cos. has dropped controversial plans for a high-rise condominium community on the Montgomery Village Golf Club.

The Northern Virginia company signed a contract to buy the 143-acre property last summer, quickly hatching plans for 1,000 units for senior citizens spread out in three, 10-story buildings, and several clusters of mid-rises and townhouses.

A coalition of homes groups and the Montgomery Village Foundation rallied to oppose any development of the golf course, bringing many questions, and the revelation that the Village does not have as much room for development under a county-enforced population cap as originally thought.

IDI Chief Operating Officer Norman F. Dreyfuss said the company based its decision less on the issue of population credits and more on the discovery that Kettler Brothers, the company that built the Village in the mid-1960s, meant the golf course to be a permanent part of an open-space plan.

‘‘We learned a lot of things we did not know, information that was not available at the beginning, a lot of things about what the Kettlers had intended, the commitments they made [to residents],” Dreyfuss said.

‘‘A lot of those documents were made available to us during the investigation process and we determined we could not build the kind of community we wanted to build,” he said.

IDI developed the Leisure World community near Norbeck and a similar senior-citizen center in Northern Virginia.

IDI relinquished all rights to buy the property on Friday, with full ownership reverting back to John C. ‘‘Jack” Doser, who has owned the property since 1980.

Dreyfuss did not comment on how much the process has cost, saying that ‘‘some contractual obligations remain.”

‘‘There was some stuff we didn’t know we should have known about, that we should have gotten when we signed the contract,” he said. ‘‘It’s just some stuff we’re trying to evaluate, that had we known at the beginning we would not have gone ahead.”

Doser could not be reached for comment.

Dreyfuss, who said IDI did not speak with another developer to take over the contract, was unsure of the impact IDI’s decision would have on the likelihood of another developer taking interest, but did say it will likely ‘‘create problems for anybody that’s going to look at it.

‘‘There may be ways around the issues that have been raised that maybe in the final court of law you might win,” he said. ‘‘To us, they’re not the kind of things we’d try to get around. Our goal was not to find some surreptitious way around all this stuff.”

‘‘There’s a sense of relief, but there’s also a sense of purpose because this could happen again in another time, in another way, and now it’s about anticipating rather than reacting,” said Lois Campbell, who lives near the golf course, and opposed the development.

Campbell helped uncover a discrepancy in the number of population credits available for development projects and finding Kettler Brothers testimony to the County Council as to their intent that the course remain a golf course in perpetuity.

‘‘I think we put together a coalition that was very effective. And whether it was effective in getting IDI to change their minds, or in getting Park and Planning to change their numbers, it doesn’t really matter,” she said. ‘‘When all was said and done, we had the facts of the case on our side.”