Local officials have deep concerns about a state plan to ease the local burden of expanding Bethesda National Naval Medical Center that includes more than $50 million for education but only about $5 million for alleviating traffic, despite predictions that gridlock will be the biggest problem.
Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown gave Gov. Martin O’Malley his Base Realignment and Closure action plan for the state, after months of meetings with local officials around in communities where military restructuring will occur.
The plan lists budget priorities for the current fiscal year including $1.275 million in funds for a new cultural arts center at Montgomery College’s Takoma Park campus and nearly $50 million for school construction, but only $5.4 million for transit issues, all of which would go toward parking lots and the county’s bus system.
A recent report from the Navy said the Bethesda military hospital is expected to add as many as 2,500 workers and see its patient load nearly double to about 900,000 visits per year after the closure of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in less than four years.
“This has to translate at some point into a commitment for dollars to address the transportation infrastructure needs of our community,” Montgomery Councilman Roger Berliner told The Examiner. “At the very beginning of the document, in the mission statement, it speaks to quality of life …. to meet that commitment in Montgomery County requires dollars for transportation projects, and that commitment has not been made to date.”
Montgomery’s top elected official, County Executive Ike Leggett, and other local leaders had repeatedly urged Brown to remember the county when doling out state aide, saying that although other BRAC projects at places like Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Meade may involve more jobs and larger geographic areas, Bethesda is the only urban BRAC location.
After Brown released a draft of the plan last month, Leggett sent the governor a letter expressing concern about local projects slated for funding that “have little or no relationship to that BRAC plan,” and said area residents have complained about the inclusion of “irrelevant projects without offering specific plans to addresstheir impending traffic nightmare.”
