One of the items on next Tuesday’s Council agenda is the demolition of 309 N Frederick Avenue. This building, known as the Talbott House (which can be seen in this aerial photo, it’s on the southeast corner of Montgomery Ave and MD355, across MD355 from the cemetery entrance and across Montgomery from the Kinko’s parking lot [probably under the navigator toolbox, just minimize that]) has been used as a hair salon for nearly twenty years. According to the background materials on the City’s website, Mr. Halici first applied for a permit to demolish the home in 1999, although HDC approval was not granted until 2003. This permit expired in 2006 after having been extended once. According HPAC’s supporting background [transcribed from the bitmap PDF, consult the original before quoting],
“The applicant did not provide evidence sufficient to meet his burden of proof by showing that retention of the historic house creates a substantial financial hardship for the applicant. The financial information presented was incomplete and lacked sufficient detail to make a conclusive case that if any hardship does exist, that it exists solely because of the requirement to retain the historic house on the designated property…”
and
“The applicant has had substantial time to improve his economic status by finding a buyer or new tenant without the restriction of retaining the historic house during the period in which the approved, but now expired, demolition permit, HAWP-37C, was in effect. However, the applicant, by his own testimony, admits that he did not make any more progress in advancing his economic status during that period than during the period prior to the issuance of the demolition permit in which preservation of the historic house was required under the historic designation”
The document also states that Mr. Halici refused to provide more financial evidence “because of his desire for financial privacy”. HPAC, quite rightly I believe, voted unanimously to recommend denial of the demolition permit. It is a trivial matter to identify many examples of historic properties for which the owners have found successful, adaptive reuse, and it is unclear why Mr Halici, despite running, according to the HPAC report, a profitable business there for many years, is unable to do the same.
Historic designation is not granted arbitrarily, there has to be a genuine historic value to the property, which results in a public interest in the retention of the resource that in turn justifies the tax breaks that accrue to the property owner in return for maintaining the property in its historic state. It would seem to me that if the HDC rejects HPAC’s recommendation and allows Mr. Halici to demolish this historic property, then any owner of a historic property in the City of Gaithersburg should be allowed to assert economic hardship without any burden of proof, demolish any buildings on their property, and build a modern McMansion which could then be sold for a tidy profit. What would be the point of a system of historic designation if it is not to protect against such arbitrary destruction of resources?