Montgomery County Councilmembers who call the attempt to examine the county's current structure of land-use authority "a power grab" are implicitly acknowledging they have been wielding that power through the current Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission structure. The disastrous results of the Council's exercise of that power speak for themselves. Their hand-picked five members of the Montgomery County Planning Board were forced to resign this fall, under accusations of consuming alcohol in their County office building and pressuring others to do so, creating a "toxic misogynistic and hostile workplace," repeated violations of the Open Meetings act, letting individual commissioners' grievances implode the board, and engaging in staff firings as retribution. Those five people, in the Council's judgement, were the five best who had applied. That says as much about the Council as about the disgraced commissioners themselves.
Those issues that led to a regional embarrassment for the County this fall were hardly the only ones to stain the Planning Board and County Council. The Board and Council have routinely passed master and sector plans over the outspoken objections of the communities the plans will guide growth policy and zoning in.
Thrive 2050 was only the most recent example, a "blow-up-single-family-home neighborhoods" plan and developer fever dream the Council rubber-stamped into law mere days after declaring that it had "no confidence" in the five commissioners who drafted and approved every word of it. Virtually all of the support for Thrive 2050 came from people who do not actually live in the single-family home neighborhoods the plan would bulldoze, developers, and Astro-turf "YIMBY" activists. The plan itself was neither novel nor innovative, but a hodgepodge document plagiarized from the few other jurisdictions around the country corrupt and crazy enough to end the single-family home zoning most consider to be the American Dream. Other than generating more developer profits, those earlier Thrive-style efforts elsewhere have failed to realize any of the false promises their advocates had touted.
M-NCPPC, the Planning Department and Planning Board have a horrific record on racial bias, particularly with the African-American community. The most prominent examples of this have been the Farm Road scandal, the desecration and attempted cover-up of the Moses African Cemetery in Bethesda, and the repeated calling of multiple armed police officers to silence or remove African-American protesters at Planning Board meetings. The Council had full knowledge of those events, and never exercised their self-proclaimed "power" to criticize, investigate or remove any employee, commissioner or chair involved in those well-documented racist actions. Not even after the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020 did the Council revisit these transgressions.
Now that County Executive Marc Elrich and State Senator Ben Kramer are attempting to formulate a process to examine a reform or replacement of the current land-use authority structure, the Council is attempting to end the discussion before it starts. It's too late for that, because residents affected by the land-use decisions made over the last two decades have already been discussing it. That discussion has led to increasing calls to rein in M-NCPPC and the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission. It's time to have this conversation, and explore the options.
Much like the County's outdated government monopoly on the sale of alcohol, the M-NCPPC is a highly-unusual arrangement for a land-use authority. It includes Montgomery and Prince George's County, two jurisdictions that just happen to have had many development-related scandals and outsized developer influence over the years. Those scandals - topped off last week by new questions about the ousted Planning Board's 2021 purchase of parcels in downtown Bethesda for $9.6 million for a park that now won't be built - have led us to the point that we need to look at how to make land-use decisions more accountable to all stakeholders, not just to those with the most money and power.
The proposed commission, representing cooperation between county and state leaders, is a good starting point for this discussion. It's clear that those who have wielded the "power" in land-use and zoning decisions have abused that power, shown major errors in judgement, and failed to exercise their oversight role responsibly. They've lost their unearned privilege to continue to hold that power.
Reforming the land-use authority structure could well mean transferring that power to others. It could also mean pulling Montgomery County out of the M-NCPPC. It should also mean restoring the Office of the People's Council and sector plan committees, and the creation of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions as Washington, D.C. has, to strengthen accountability to residents. We can't achieve reform until we take a hard look at the situation, through efforts such as the proposed commission.
A first step in being stripped of power is admitting you hold that power through a corrupt, antiquated and - on many occasions - racist structure of authority. The Council has made that admission loud and clear. Now is the time for adults in the room to chart a new way forward. If you openly state you have had the "power," you must also accept full responsibility for the wreckage that power is on the record as having caused, and not block the path to fixing it.
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