Montgomery County Maryland Planning Board resigns

 Holy s*.  From the Washington Post article "Montgomery planning board resigns amid scandals, at council’s urging":

All five members of the Montgomery County Planning Board resigned Wednesday after the county council said it had “lost confidence” in the board and needed to “reset operations” following weeks of escalating misconduct accusations, media leaks and damaged staff morale.

The council, which appoints the board, voted unanimously in a closed session Tuesday to ask the entire board to resign, according to two people familiar with the vote. Those who didn’t resign would have faced a public hearing seeking their removal, the people said.

The upheaval in the planning agency’s governance has shocked even longtime political observers in a county accustomed to intense development spats. It follows a trail of scandals and leaks that has dogged one of Montgomery’s most influential institutions since mid-September.

“The Council has lost confidence in the Montgomery County Planning Board and accepted these resignations to reset operations,” said Montgomery council president Gabe Albornoz (D-At Large). “We are acting with deliberate speed to appoint new commissioners to move Montgomery County forward. We thank the commissioners for their service to our county.”

Casey Anderson, chair of the Montgomery County Planning Board, in Forest Grove Park in Silver Spring in 2018. (John Kelly/The Washington Post)

I'm saddened by this.  Casey Anderson, the chair, was someone I met through bike advocacy, and in 2010, as a member of the Planning Board, he invited me to present on "best practice suburban bicycle planning" at the Montgomery County Planning smart growth series, based on the work I was doing at the time in Baltimore County.  

I talked about "the back story" of how I was approaching this from my perspective as an urban person committed to smart growth and sustainable mobility, and the lessons I had been learning.

The presentation helped me figure out some stuff too.

Later I gave a presentation to the Citizens Federation and I think it helped up the County's game on bicycle planning, even if not perfect.  We became friends, not just acquaintances. Although we talked shop from time to time over the years--never ex parte communication though.

A few years later, I actually helped him write his cover letter for his candidacy as Chair of the Planning Board, for which he was selected.  He was toward the mandatory maximum of two terms as Chair, with about a year left ("Montgomery County, Md., has 421 parks. This guy wants to visit every one," Washington Post).

Because I always talked up parks planner David Barth ("David Barth: Rest in Peace"), he even brought him in to do some training and consulting for the County Parks Department.

But lately the board has been wrent with a bunch of issues, and Casey screwed up too by not following policy ("Montgomery council docks pay of official who kept alcohol in office," Post) and being arrogant or at the very least, choosing poor language ("New complaint filed in Montgomery County planning controversy," Post), 

The lesson is that even if you're great at what you do, and I can't think of many people better than Casey on smart growth and sustainable mobility issues, there is going to be lots of opposition* regardless, so you don't ever want to do anything that gives your opponents an advantage -- you know the line "give them an inch, they'll take a mile."

Give no inches.

In the DC region, Montgomery County is one of the foremost jurisdictions when it comes to the thoroughness of their planning.  It might not be the most visionary, but it's decently visionary.  They do good things.

It's unusual in two ways.  First, in theory (although it's not longer really true), Montgomery and Prince George's Counties have a coordinated planning system created by the Maryland State Legislature in the 1920s to complement the efforts of the then named National Capital Parks and Planning Commission operating in Washington, DC.(NCPPC grew out of the famous McMillan Commission, a Senate special committee.)

(When DC was run by the federal government, the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission ran parks and planning.  In 1973, when DC gained Home Rule, the city took on local planning responsibility, while the National Capital Planning Commission (and the Commission on Fine Arts) remained as bodies responsible for federal planning as it relates to DC and in some cases the metropolitan area, while the National Park Service still has primary responsibility for a majority of park space in DC.)

The joint planning agency for MoCo and PGC is called the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission, which runs planning and parks in Montgomery County (the Executive Branch runs Recreation functions separately) and planning, parks, and recreation in Prince George's County.  But these many decades later the two counties mostly have independent planning regimes and little coordination when it comes to land use, although the MNCPPC structure still exists and there are some joint functions.

Second, Montgomery County is the only jurisdiction in the United States, where the planning (and parks) function is not part of the Executive Branch, but is under the Legislative Branch, in this case the Montgomery County Council.

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* Opposition to land use planners and planning as a matter of course.  Even in the best of times there is a lot of opposition to planning and planners.  I've written about this a lot.  The problem is that planners have two responsibilities, while most citizens involved in planning take on only one.

Planners are responsible not just for making neighborhoods great, but for dealing with a wide range of other planning responsibilities--economic development and growth, transportation, equity, etc.--while for the most part residents only care about keeping their neighborhoods the same.

This leads to what I think of as planning processes that are flawed from the outset, where consensus may never be possible.

Of course, it's even worse because I don't think planners ever define these sets and spheres of responsibilities and the conflicts and constraints that result.

Maybe, as Casey would say to me, people will always oppose, regardless of the rightness and fitness of the proposal, regardless of how much they learned about planning principles.

And actually, I think he's somewhat right.  But I do know that without laying out those various and sometimes conflicting responsibilities, you're setting yourself up for if not failure, at least disappointment.

Because land use planning is about managing not preventing development, you're always going to get plenty of citizens calling the system corrupt.

It's not corrupt--well, not usually.  Sometimes it is.

But mostly it's capitalism.  It's the Growth Machine.

But interestingly, in matters of land use development, the average citizen expresses a kind of socialism, that the group is more important--and that no development is better.

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This also reminds me of my joke that local government workers in DC went to work with the idea that they needed to be on the straight and narrow so that they wouldn't be subject of an article in the Washington Post Metro section and definitely not on the front page.  These debacles in MoCo have been the subject of multiple Metro section articles.