Citizens file suit to enforce smart growth and protect the environment in Prince George’s County
Bowie, August 27. Local residents and environmentalists have petitioned the Circuit Court to review Prince George’s County’s approval of a dense housing development in the middle of a remote office park in Bowie, next to the Patuxent River. According to the petitioners, the revised conceptual plan for “Melford Village” would create a dense auto-dependent community far from mass transit and isolated from the rest of Bowie. It would increase congestion and air pollution, damage the Patuxent watershed, and undermine the potential of the office park for attracting employers to the county. Reducing congestion, travel times, and greenhouse gas emissions, protecting sensitive environmental features, and attracting quality employers are major County objectives.
Melford, formerly known as the Maryland Science and Technology Center, is located northeast of the intersection of US Route 50 and MD Route 3 in Bowie, bounded on the eastern edge by the Patuxent River and Anne Arundel County. It is separated from the rest of Bowie by these two major highways and accessed by a single entrance off of MD Route 3, connecting with Belair Drive in a residential section of Bowie on the east side of Route 3.
The Melford property is designated as an employment center in both the 2006 Bowie Master Plan and the 2014 Prince George’s County General Plan. The revised conceptual plan approved by the District Council in March 2015 reduces office and commercial uses at Melford by 2 million square feet, while adding 4.8 million square feet of residential uses – 2,500 residential units, of which 500 are townhouses, 1,000 are market-rate multifamily units, and 1,000 are age-restricted senior multifamily units. The District Council is comprised of members of the County Council acting in their zoning authority.
“The large residential component is going to displace a lot of the future high quality employment uses that were the original intent of the plan,” according to Bowie resident Lauren Ragsac, one of the petitioners. The 2006 Bowie Master Plan rezoned Melford to allow housing in the mix of uses, but stipulated that it remain first and foremost an employment center. It capped residential uses at 866 units and 30% of the gross square footage of the entire development. “In 2009, the District Council rejected a proposal for 866 residential units because it didn’t support the employment objective,” said Bruce Pletsch, President of the Sherwood Manor Civic Association. “Now they’ve approved three times more units in a similar configuration. It makes no sense.” If all proposed uses are built out according to the revised conceptual plan, residential would comprise two-thirds of the uses at Melford, commercial/office/retail uses only one-third
Cheryl Cort, Policy Director at the Coalition for Smarter Growth, testified that “The poorly connected site will force new residents to rely on driving for every trip, and face longer trips to reach destinations,” since “the only viable means of access to the development is by car.” She stated that the development would increase sprawl and auto dependency, put too much residential development in the wrong place, and divert development from areas of the county better served by existing infrastructure.
Martha Ainsworth, chair of the Prince George’s Sierra Club, pointed to substantial impact of Melford Village on already-congested Route 3, increased greenhouse gas emissions from the auto-dependent community, and reductions in the quality of life for area residents. “The applicant’s traffic analysis estimated that the residential component alone would generate more than 14,000 car trips daily,” she said. “There is no plan for mass transit at the site nor is there a guarantee that bus service will be established. The nearest metro station is 10 miles away. The internal market of Melford Village will support only ‘convenience retail’. Residential traffic will clog the roadways and spill over to Belair Drive seven days a week.”
According to Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman, “This type of dense development in or near floodplains and sensitive water resources is exactly what’s killing the Patuxent River and many tributaries along the Chesapeake Bay. There’s plenty of state policy that disfavors this sort of sprawl and its legacy of harm to regional water quality.” He argued that “the residential component needs to be scaled way back and moved away from the river, and restrictions on impervious surfaces strengthened, so that Melford can serve as a County employment center with the best possible environmental standards.”
Total buildout to date at Melford, which includes the Institute for Defense Analyses, the International Masonry Institute, the US Bureau of the Census, the Prince George’s County 911 call center, and numerous office and flex buildings for lease by St. John Properties, stands at 1.15 million square feet, with additional flex buildings, three Marriott hotels, and several retail uses, approved but not yet constructed. Construction is underway for a $40 million, 100,000 square foot archive center for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The petitioners include residents of Bowie and of Sherwood Manor, a subdivision north of the Melford property, and the Patuxent Riverkeeper, an organization whose mission is to conserve and protect the Patuxent River and to achieve long-term sustainability for the ecosystem of its basin and the people who rely on it. The Sierra Club is supporting the lawsuit. The City of Bowie and St. John Properties have joined the Prince George’s District Council in opposition.
Oral arguments before the Circuit Court are scheduled for September 25, 2015 at 9 am in Upper Marlboro. The case is Pletsch et al v. Prince George’s District Council, CAL-15-08843.
Contacts: Martha Ainsworth (Martha.ainsworth@mdsierra.org) 301-262-8389; Fred Tutman (fred@paxriverkeeper.org) 301-579-2073 ext7; Bruce Pletsch (bpmcgyver@earthlink.net)
