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The Montgomery County Council last week unanimously approved a $107 million project to rent then buy the GE Tech Park in Gaithersburg, clearing the way turn the 52-acre parcel into the county's public safety headquarters.
The county's police and fire departments are expected to finish moving into the five-story office building at the GE Tech Park by early 2010.
Several offices in the county's Department of Transportation are expected to be moved into the 375,000-square-foot office building by the end of the month, said David Dise, director of the county's Department of General Services.
Thirty million dollars-worth of renovations on the 30-year-old building will begin in October.
Purchase of GE Tech, proposed more than a year ago as part of County Executive Isiah Leggett's plan to relocate more than a dozen county operations, also calls for the police department's 1st District station to move into the first floor. Officials do not know when that will happen.
Still at issue is a county agreement with the City of Gaithersburg, which had asked the County Council not to approve any funding for GE Tech until officials had settled those terms.
The county sent the city a draft of that Memorandum of Understanding Friday. City officials were reviewing it as of Monday.
The two sides have roughly agreed on preserving seven forested acres abutting the Lakelands and keeping the front lawn on Route 28 open except for a public safety memorial. But months of negotiations have left the city wanting for long-term county guarantees to not build on GE Tech and compensation for lost tax revenues, which last year came to more than $160,000.
"Those two things are unlikely to be settled, and I'm very disappointed about that," City Councilman Jud Ashman said Monday, before he had seen the county's draft MOU.
He expects city leaders to review the agreement in the coming weeks.
What's next
Approval of the GE Tech plan leaves two aspects Leggett's Smart Growth Initiative unsettled: Purchase of the 130-acre Webb Tract near Montgomery Village and locating a new site for the school system's bus depot, at the 92-acre county service park off Shady Grove Road.
Leggett (D) has agreed to a $46 million purchase of the Webb Tract, a vacant lot near the Montgomery County Airpark abutted by thousands of homes.
A coalition of those neighbors has now come out against any county development there.
In the year after Leggett included the Webb Tract in his Smart Growth Initiative, community leaders cautiously went along with plans to build the school system's food distribution warehouse and the county police and fire/rescue training academy on about half of the property. But Leggett's surprise decision in March to buy the entire Webb Tract and build two other industrial depots rallied several communities into a loose coalition that has declared the project "incompatible with a residential community."
The current Public Safety Training Academy is on 52 acres at Great Seneca Highway and Route 28 near Shady Grove. Building a PSTA at the Webb Tract would open that land up for more than 2,000 homes, a school and a mass transit stop that Leggett and many county leaders said are needed to support plans to turn a 900-acre area in Shady Grove into a life sciences hub. Moving the school food warehouse and two maintenance depots from the service park on Crabbs Branch Way would clear the way for housing, office and retail development next to the Shady Grove metro station.
But the coalition of representatives from the Montgomery Village Foundation, Hunters Woods, the Midcounty Citizens Alliance and five HOAs in Montgomery Village say the benefits of moving the operations to the Webb Tract don't outweigh the damage it will do to their neighborhoods.
"Our neighborhoods are unique community resources worthy of protection from industrial/commercial development and other incompatible uses/activities that are inconsistent with the residential character of our communities," according to the coalition's May 7 letter to Leggett. "… [T]his proposed development would without a doubt reduce the ‘sense of place' that we have today."
The coalition prefers no development or "a mix of retail, restaurants and entertainment opportunities which are sorely lacking in this area of Montgomery Village."
The County Council is expected to review funding for the purchase and build-out of the Webb Tract this summer. If approved, construction would begin by the end of the year.