Budget troubles to curtail Montgomery planning panel’s agenda

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Budget woes will force Montgomery’s Planning Department to delay or abandon county environmental protection initiatives, traffic-relief studies and some of the transportation and zoning planning necessary in rapidly growing Bethesda next year, planning officials said Tuesday.

Planning Department leaders said they will put off a state-required analysis of the county’s long-term water supply and quality for at least a year and scrap a study of how to reduce demand and generate more energy. They will also delay doing two Bethesda neighborhood master plans, which set zoning policy and detail transportation improvements and pedestrian routes in communities.

Council President Mike Knapp said the council gave the Planning Department $18.9 million to operate in the coming year, but that the county’s $297 million budget gap required difficult choices.

“In a tough budget year we’ve got to pick and we’ve got to make sure that departments are able to do their core mission,” Knapp said. “For the fire department, that is keeping response time down, for the police it’s keeping a steady number of officers on the street, and for the planning department we wanted them focusing on master plans and development review.”

Planning Department Director Rollin Stanley said planners had hoped to complete seven or eight master plans next year. They adjusted their expectations, however, because of county budget problems and postponed updating master plans for Bethesda’s Westward community, which surrounds River Road and Little Falls Parkway, and the Battery Lane community in northern Bethesda.

“We are looking at efficiencies all over right down to mailings and color copies,” Stanley said. “We want people to accept CDs and PDF versions of documents so they can read online. With what goes into copying and mailing a 150-page document, if you put that on a CD instead, you save a lot of money and time.”

Knapp said Planning Department goals for the coming year were ambitious to start with, because the department typically completes about four master plans a year, not the seven or eight it proposed.

“It was unlikely they could have delivered that,” Knapp said, “and even more unlikely if they did that we would have had time to get all the public input, fiscal impact studies and everything else to get through them all anyway.”

kmiller@dcexaminer.com

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