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County Council approves Seven Locks compromise

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

A messy political fight over an embattled Potomac school project that threatened to derail Montgomery County’s budget has ended with a compromise that avoided resolving who has ultimate control over school projects.

After a weekend of phone calls, e-mails and brainstorming sessions, the County Council on May 17 approved a plan intended to assuage parents, educators and voters.

Over the course of a week, county public school officials stepped away from a project they had adamantly backed for more than two years to pitch an alternative, and the council killed a project it had funded two years ago.

On May 17, the council decided to modernize Bells Mill Elementary by July 2009, a year earlier than planned and larger than envisioned, and to modernize Seven Locks Elementary by December 2011.

The council voted unanimously for the plan, bringing to an end three months of acrimonious debate among council members, the county school board and the Potomac community.

Left hanging

With the compromise, elected officials avoided lawsuits from the community and among themselves. Had the council pushed, the board could have asked a judge to decide whether it could refuse to spend money on a project it did not support. The agreement leaves that matter open.

‘‘The shoe hanging over everybody’s head was how far could the council go with its authority before the school board would react because it thought its authority was being attacked,” said Councilman Michael L. Subin (D-At large) of Gaithersburg. ‘‘We were in a military DMZ. It was a no-person’s land. We didn’t want to go to war. We didn’t want to go to court.”

Schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast agreed.

‘‘We had all been discussing anything but war,” he said. ‘‘Because that only hurts children and does not do anybody any good.”

What still remains unresolved is what happens to the Kendale Road site in Potomac, where the school board and the council’s Education Committee had recommended building a Seven Locks replacement school.

In 2004, the council approved building the replacement on the Kendale Road site, about 1.5 miles away from the Seven Locks campus. The school system had already spent $750,000 for planning and design work there.

That money has ‘‘gone into the ground” for soil testing and tree surveys, school board President Charles Haughey said.

‘‘That’s a great loss,” he said. ‘‘It’s a loss to the system and it’s a loss to the county. But it’s money spent.”

What the school system is left with is land that the council says is unsuitable for building a school. No one wants to say what should happen there.

‘‘I am not going to touch that one,” Subin said. ‘‘I will leave that to others. Obviously, they can’t do anything with it. I don’t know what that means for the future.”

‘Move the kids’

A resolution started to form May 11 when the County Council voted 6-3 to reject Kendale Road as a site for a Seven Locks Elementary replacement school.

Building a replacement Seven Locks on Kendale Road has met almost unanimous opposition from Seven Locks parents since the board approved the plan in 2004.

During the council’s discussion on May 11, Councilman Steven A. Silverman (D-At large) of Silver Spring suggested expanding Bells Mill Elementary.

‘‘I think the key to the whole thing was when Steve Silverman said, ‘Move the kids to Bells Mill,’” said Subin, chairman of the council’s Education Committee.

The suggestion, one of eight options a school-council task force identified as a way to relieve the crowding Potomac Elementary, about 2.5 miles away, did not receive council support on May 11.

‘‘But it caused people to step back and say, ‘Well, why not?’ You get the relief,” Subin said.

That got the phones ringing.

Almost immediately after the May 11 meeting, Ken Hartman, confidential aide to Councilman Howard A. Denis, called Keith Levchenko, who oversees the school system’s capital budget for the council. Both men were part of the task force charged with looking at the Seven Locks issue.

A weekend of brainstorming by council members and school planners followed.

Schools facilities director Richard G. Hawes, long-range planning director Bruce H. Crispell and Chief Operating Officer Larry A. Bowers met with Superintendent Jerry D. Weast over the Mother’s Day weekend to discuss the questions posed by the council’s May 11 discussion.

One question was how to help Bells Mill Elementary, where parents have complained about crowding and the poor conditions of its eight portable classrooms. Another question was how to assure Seven Locks parents that their school would not be closed.

Burning up the phone lines

The collaboration between the school system and the council took place in calls among Subin, Weast and Hawes.

‘‘There was never any attempt to broker some backdoor deal over the weekend,” Hawes said. ‘‘... We were talking to [Subin] to see if he thought it was going to be something that would stick.”

On May 15, Haughey, who had been talking to top school administrators throughout the weekend, sent a letter to the council declaring the board’s ‘‘unanimous support” for a plan to modernize Bells Mill as a larger school by July 2009.

Later that day, board members Valerie Ervin and Nancy Navarro said Haughey had not consulted them before sending the letter. Navarro (Dist. 5) of Silver Spring said she did not support the plan because it did not address the Seven Locks situation. Ervin (Dist. 4) of Silver Spring said she was ‘‘not comfortable on the fly, making these kinds of decisions.”

By May 16, when school officials came to the council’s Education Committee with a plan, Haughey (At large) of Rockville had backtracked from the letter, saying it had been sent prematurely and telling the council that ‘‘a majority of the board” supported the proposal.

The Education Committee approved the proposal May 16 with a promise from Weast: Seven Locks would remain open as a fully operational school.

‘‘That was one of Seven Locks [parents’] greatest fears because there wasn’t anything that could be done right now to say [the school would stay open] forever,” Hawes said.

‘Trust but verify’

The committee recommended the plan in a 2-1 vote, with Denis (R-Dist. 1) of Chevy Chase voting against it.

‘‘I voted against it because there are too many blank spaces,” he said. ‘‘I want to see it in writing. It’s a trust-but-verify situation.”

Over the next few hours, Denis’ staff went to work on a compromise.

Jennifer Hughes, who once oversaw schools issues as part of the nonpartisan County Council staff and now works for Denis, sat down with Subin.

Subin said he met with Hughes until 5:30 p.m. on May 16, but ‘‘as late as 8:15 [on the morning of May 17] I was sure that we still had a problem.”

The question was whether Denis would accept a statement guaranteeing that Seven Locks would remain a functioning school or whether he needed something more.

School officials worked with Denis’ staff on the dollar amounts, the timing and ‘‘the wording on the technical language” until an hour before the May 17 council meeting, Weast said.

Denis had pushed for rebuilding Seven Locks at its existing site on Seven Locks Road since Feb. 15, when a report from county Inspector General Thomas J. Dagley questioned how the school board arrived at its decision to build on Kendale Road. An audit by Dagley’s office said the Seven Locks project could be done cheaper.

After the May 16 vote, Denis said he intended to push his proposal to rebuild at Seven Locks when the council convened the next morning. At the same time his staff was consulting with Subin and working out language for a compromise.

‘‘People were banging on us from all sides,” Hartman said. ‘‘Stick with your [proposal]. Don’t abandon us at Bells Mill.”

On May 17, Denis decided to back the Bells Mill plan after language was added to budget documents calling for planning for the Seven Locks modernization and addition to begin in fiscal 2007.

‘‘Overnight we moved numbers and years,” Denis said. ‘‘We made it immediate, so that in ’07 it gets locked down.”

The language ‘‘is the life insurance the Seven Locks community needs that that will remain a school,” he said.