A group of Rockville residents who live near a drug rehabilitation clinic want Montgomery County officials to include the methadone treatment center in plans to relocate a host of county offices.
The clinic, which shares space with the county’s board of elections, is run out of the former Broome Elementary School on Twinbrook Parkway. It sits next to Meadow Hall Elementary School and across the street from an upper-middle-class neighborhood.
“It just doesn’t fit with this neighborhood,” said Dainia Langsam, a mother of three who travels to the elementary school and a nearby pre-school as many as eight times a day. Langsam said she’s comfortable walking her elementary-age children in the morning — the county has placed security guards outside the clinic — but she drives to the preschool later in the morning because the guards have left.
Many of the clinic’s 250 patients wait for buses out front, smoking cigarettes and swearing, parents said. And it’s not just the patients, but also their friends who come with them, some of whom residents said they’ve seen picking through trash and some residents believe might be connected to burglaries in the area.
With the County Board of Elections slated to be moved to Gaithersburg as part of a massive overhaul of county facilities, the rehab clinic may also find a new home, Patrick Lacefield, spokesman for County Executive Ike Leggett, said.
Those overhaul plans, announced by Leggett in December, have been met with resistance in some areas. In Poolesville, where the county wanted to build a new Public Safety Academy, it was residents’ fearing increased traffic and damage to the area’s rural character, as well as the off-center location, that pushed the plans back. The academy is now slated for property in Montgomery Village where residents are awaiting a meeting with county officials before weighing in.
Regina DeCarlo, 30, grew up in the neighborhood across from the clinic where she is now raising her 4-year-old son. “I used to play at the Broome playground … now I won’t go near it,” DeCarlo said.
She and others said they understand and appreciate the county’s efforts to offer rehab services, but they said the facility should be placed away from residential areas and schools.
“This is not the way I want to live,” DeCarlo said.
