In a desperate effort to retain some semblance of credibility after the Clarksburg Town Center scandal shattered Montgomery County’s national reputation for professional planning, County Council members voted unanimously to bring back an oldie but goodie to head the beleaguered Planning Board.
Royce Hanson, the architect of the county’s vast agricultural reserve, has been tapped again (he was Planning Board chairman from 1972-81) to straighten out the 900-employee Park and Planning Department that has recently demonstrated an unusually high level of incompetence and malfeasance, even for this highly bureaucratic county. It won’t take much to outperform outgoing chairman Derick Berlage, who allowed the residential Clarksburg project to be built with streets too narrow to accommodate fire and rescue vehicles.
Berlage had the gall to seek a second four-year term until he was convinced council members would not support him again. And for good reason. On his watch, county employees deliberately altered site plans, kept sloppy records or none at all, and allowed attorneys employed by developers to write the county’s legal opinions. Even Berlage’s close ties to Steve Silverman, chairman of the Council’s Planning, Housing and Economic Development Committee who helped Berlage get the $129,000 job and was supposed to be supervising him, didn’t help this time.
Yet of those responsible for the gross “dereliction of responsibility” Hanson correctly decried, just four high-ranking planning officials have resigned. A more thorough house cleaning is in order. Hanson should severely reprimand all the other county employees who were rude to the Clarksburg citizens investigating the anomalies they found on their own time and at their own expense. It’s outrageous that taxpayers — who were in effect doing county employees’ job for them — were at the same time being subjected to insolent and occasionally hostile treatment from the same people whose salaries they pay.
However, termination is in order for the so-called inspectors who were supposed to be enforcing county ordinances and especially for those who actively stymied Inspector General Thomas Dagley’s efforts to obtain documents and interview staff members. Keeping them on staff is just asking for future trouble.
Hanson, now a research professor at George Washington University and by all accounts an honest, hard-nosed, no-nonsense administrator, has been a harsh critic of the $100 million agency. He will no doubt do his best to restore its now quite tattered reputation.
But even Hanson must admit that his idea of placing severe restrictions on development in the western fourth of a still-growing county hasn’t stopped it, just pushed it out further from the metropolitan core. The urban sprawl that extends to numerous developments beyond Clarksburg is a direct result of the county’s planning efforts when Hanson was last in charge. And the reason there’s not enough “mixed-use” development now is because government planners a generation ago didn’t allow it.
The challenge is to encourage new growth — and yes, that includes houses, shops, offices, roads and public transportation — without forcing out long-time residents or totally destroying what made the county so attractive in the first place. If Hanson can manage the delicate balance between old and new, communities all across the nation will once again look to Montgomery County for the answers.
