More News

County officials say it is unclear who pays for projects included in neighborhood plans in Germantown if the developer defaults and the bond it posted is insufficient.

The plans include 22 streetlights that were supposed to be provided by a developer of Wisteria Drive more than 20 years ago.

There are two streetlights on a half-mile stretch of Wisteria between Great Seneca Highway and Sky Blue Drive. Developer Stanley Martin of Reston, Va., was required to install the fixtures when the Gunners Lake Village community was built in the early 1980s, but seemingly defaulted on its $12,600 bond for the project, leaving the county to finish the task. Residents have pushed for the lights over the years, saying that the dark road attracts crime and is a danger to pedestrians.

The 22 streetlights would have cost roughly $29,700 in 1984, not including cable installation and other expenses, according to county documents obtained by The Gazette through a Maryland Public Information Act request. The project would have cost $600,000 in 1998.

Tom Pogue, a county spokesman, said last month that he did not think the county was required to install the lights and described its efforts to get the fixtures as a "good faith effort."

Wisteria Drive was one of 13 roads included in County Executive Isiah Leggett's Pedestrian Safety Initiative, released in December. Funding for the first year of the initiative, $4.8 million, will come from speed camera revenue, Leggett (D) announced last month. The report recommends spending $500,000 a year to install streetlights on roads built without them and notes that roads may be removed or added to the list as priorities shift.

But with a wide variety of pedestrian safety improvements needed throughout the county, it is unclear how long it will take for Wisteria's problems to be resolved. The list is not prioritized.

"These residents on Wisteria do deserve lights and we're trying to find the money, but we don't know when that will be," said Esther Bowring, a county spokeswoman. No recent cost estimates have been made for the project, she said.

Two committees of county transportation staff and agency directors will use collision data and resident comments to prioritize the projects for next year's budget, Pogue said.

"There's no way in one fiscal year, even with $4.8 million going just toward lighting, that we could do it all, and lights are just one portion," Pogue said of lighting projects countywide. It has not yet been determined how much money will go toward streetlights, he said.

The circumstances surrounding the missing fixtures remain unclear.

Former County Councilwoman Nancy Dacek (R-Dist. 2) of Darnestown asked for an emergency appropriation for half of the lights' cost in 1998 to get the project moving, a request that was apparently denied.

"We really did work really hard to get those streetlights. I'm disappointed it hasn't happened," said former Dacek aide Peggy Erickson, now executive director of the nonprofit Heritage Montgomery. "Nobody saw it as a priority. They didn't want to bail out the developer, but we saw it as a public safety issue."

Dacek concurred. "The county doesn't like to do what the developer was supposed to," she said in a separate interview.

Another attempt came in 2002 when then-County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) requested funding for the lights in the 2003 Capital Improvement Program budget. The request created a CIP project for subdivisions built when developers were not required to install the fixtures, the developer defaulted on its bond or the bond was insufficient, according to the county documents obtained by The Gazette.

The County Council's transportation subcommittee voted 3-0 against the project, according to the documents. Bowring said the Council had indicated at the time that it would not fund the item if it was reintroduced but would not elaborate.

A County Council staff report from February 2002 recommended resubmitting the item once a cost-sharing policy between property owners and the county was developed, but that policy was never drafted and the project was never reintroduced, according to Glenn Orlin, deputy council staff director and author of the memorandum.

"It was a suggestion I guess I made, but the executive branch never picked up on it," Orlin said in an interview. "… It just never came back. People only have so much time to work on stuff, and people think some projects are more important than others."