Rethink College Park

The Maryland Transit Administration is sponsoring a Purple Line Community Focus Group meeting tomorrow (Thursday, 3/15) at 7:00 p.m. at the College Park Municipal Center (4500 Knox Road). It was postponed last week due to inclement weather.

From our announcement last week:

“Although the project was recently delayed at least a year, the MTA continues to plan the project and is holding community meetings to take into consideration resident’s opinions. The event invitation says the event will include information about planning that has taken place since the last meeting, held in Spring of 2006. This event will be a good opportunity to learn more about the project and ensure state planners hear from a broad spectrum of the community.”

> Purple Line library page
> Previous Purple Line articles

In addition to writing about proposed projects and policy debates, we occasionally describe some of the planning documents that regulate and direct growth in College Park. Today, we take a look at one of the most important documents to city development.

The Route 1 Sector Plan is a formal planning document adopted by the county in 2002 that officially re-zoned much of the land along Route 1 from downtown College Park to the beltway for dense, mixed-use projects designed to allow for development and encourage bicycling and walking.

It also includes detailed design information intended to help guide developers and architects creating projects in the area. Although the University is not legally required to seek county approval, they have specifically suggested the East Campus design should be in accordance with the plan.

We recently created a permanent library page showing the boundaries and describing goals of the plan in more detail.

> Library: Route 1 Corridor Sector Plan

We’re pleased to announce that a major (and in our view: reasonable) compromise was reached late last night on the impact fee waiver controversy. While everyone at the meeting agreed the boundary (that allows a county incentive for student housing) needs to be reduced from its original size (black line) to an area within the City of College Park, there was no consensus on exactly where the new boundary should be drawn. Jim Rosapepe and the 21st Delegation originally proposed (with the approval from the College Park City Council) the red boudary (seen above) and that version of the state bill went to committee last week in Annapolis. The amended proposal approved last night adds several key properties located both:

-west of Route 1 and north of 193

and

-east of Route 1 and south of 193

After these new areas were added, 6 of the 8 councimembers agreed, in an unusual pro-student vote, that the compromise boundaries (in purple) would more reasonably accommodate long term student housing needs in College Park. They apparently agreed with the reasoning that most of the property zoned “mixed-use” in the city could potentially be student housing and that it should be eligible for incentives as such. There was also talk about “density bonuses” to encourage even more housing right adjacent to campus.

We applaud last night’s decision and are especially looking forward to a period of limited RTCP political activism (after the bill becomes law).

Acting university Vice President of Administrative Affairs Frank Brewer informed us late last week that he expects an announcement of the university’s development partner for East Campus by this week’s end. East Campus has been looming over our project (this website) for the entire school year and we’re eagerly awaiting the announcement and preliminary concept plans. This project may very well surpass in scope all the other development in College Park combined.

We’re very pleased to hear that the administration is expecting a robust public input process to ensure the final product has both community buy-in and meets everyone’s expectations. What follows is a series of past concept plans for the East Campus site. Several of them were given to competing developers so they could build their proposed plans on various past ideas. This is especially true for plans produced during a 1999 Architecture Study. The East Campus project is apparently now expected to be denser than these images portray.

Two city councilmen, John Krouse and David Milligan, have proposed eliminating city funding for the little known and little understood City-University Partnership according to the Diamondback. The councilmen charge that the city seems to have gained little from its yearly (8 years) $50,000 funding of the entity and that the partnership, according to Krouse, is “being manipulated to the advantage of the university and developer interest, while providing little or nothing tangible for residents.”

We’re not sure what the councilman Krouse’s definition of “resident” is, but last we checked about half of the city’s 25,000+ population happen to be students of the University of Maryland. Perhaps Krouse should have specified permanent resident, of which District 1 (his and Milligan’s district) has many. Still, the quote from Krouse implies that the city’s budget is wholly derived from permanent resident’s pocketbooks. A pie chart (below) from the city’s own budget shows that that is hardly the case. The permanent residents, according to Krouse, aren’t getting anything for their contribution to the partnership, but they are also paying less than half of the partnership’s funding since UMD directly pays for half (of the partnership’s $100,000 budget) and university/renter-related items make up a significant share of the city’s $11 million yearly revenues. Residents will benefit just as much from a revived Route 1 Cooridor as the university community, if not more.

We had the opportunity to present this website to the partnership not long ago and were impressed that city officials and high-level university administrators do actually gather together in a room and talk about common concerns and common goals. Indeed, we recently posted the partnership’s guiding principles for the Northgate and “Knox Box” areas. Previously we’ve covered the Northgate Park project, which was spearheaded by the partnership, but appears to have taken quite a bit longer than expected (what doesn’t in College Park?). Clearly the partnership needs to be more of a public entity as some of its members have already expressed to us. Also, we agree that it needs to be more results-oriented. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a major player in College Park development and a great tool to ease town-gown tensions. So let’s get down to work and stop the political posturing.

A bill being considered by the Maryland legislature would give the City of College Park — and all incorporated cities in Prince George’s County — new controls over construction in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes.

Under the proposed bill (HB 668 and SB 581) cities will be able to regulate the following variables for both new construction or remodeling work in single-family residential areas: fences, walls, parking, residential structures, setbacks, the bulk, massing, and design of structures, and lot coverage.

The bill is modeled after a similar bill for Montogmery County passed in response to teardowns and mansionization in residential neighborhoods.

Today, we submitted written testimony to the Maryland Senate’s Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee adamently opposing the narrowing of the impact fee waiver zone. As reported recently, we feel the proposed bill in it’s current form would drastically reduce the only incentive for building student housing in College Park. Interestingly, during research for this testimony, we discovered that even the furthest developments qualifying for the existing impact fee waiver (University Town Center) had 90% bus ridership among UMD students. This project’s eligibility for the waiver was contingent on an official relationship with the university’s bus service - Shuttle-UM. If that isn’t smart growth we don’t know what is.

Our testimony provides a framework for a compromise bill that:

• Provides long-term housing relief for University of Maryland students
• Includes the views of student stakeholders
• Respects the wishes of single-family homeowners and neighboring jurisdictions
• Adheres to the state’s smart growth principles
• Recognizes the unique urban planning opportunities and challenges of a college town

The Diamondback printed today RTCP’s own blistering account of the School Facilities Impact Fee Waiver bill being considered in Annapolis today and tomorrow (read our first report on this). While the undergraduate and graduate student governments may not agree with the specific rhetoric in today’s Op-ed, they stand firmly with us in opposition to this and any plan that would drastically reduce the only incentive for student housing in the area. We’ll be in Annapolis tomorrow with student leaders to give testimony against the bill and propose a plan that takes into consideration the interests of the 35,000 UMD students that were never consulted during the bill’s drafting.

>>Diamondback - No End in Sight by David Daddio

Not far north on Route 1, just past the used-car dealerships, the psychic shop, the tattoo parlor, the rubble of a brothel and a restaurant that fell victim to an arson, sleeps a homeless man in a tent on a wooded lot. He’s taken up residency in our beautiful college town - College Park. Ironically, this man lives in the very same place that 630 graduate students were set to move to in August 2007 - the Mazza Grandmarc apartment complex. Instead, nearly 10 months after the project’s approval, the developer remains embroiled in a bitter fight over a little-known and little-understood law that gives incentives for off-campus student housing: the public school facilities impact fee waiver (henceforth referred to as the extortion fee waiver). Two committees in Annapolis are poised to reconsider (read: gut) the very same incentive this week with a bill championed by local elected officials.
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