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From a Montgomery County Police Department Press Release:

The purpose for the Hispanic/Latino Liaison Committee is to form a partnership between the police department and the Hispanic/Latino community, keep open lines of communication, hear concerns, and develop trust between the department and the community at-large. Anyone interested in attending the meeting should call 301-840-2881.

Did any readers attend this?

The City has posted the agenda for the September 18, 2006 Mayor and Council Meeting. As usual, there’s a few minor items:

• A consent item on a contract for the Lake Placid Dam Analysis
• A few committee appointments
• Proclamation of “Constitution Week”
• Proclamation of “National Hispanic Heritage Month”
• Resolution on the US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement

Some items that are a bit more complex but as far as I know are not controversial (please let me know in the comments if I’m wrong about this):

• Discussion of SDP-06-002, request for change of use (The Goddard School)
• Public hearing on a zoning change that I wrote about earlier.
• Staff request to close the record in T-372, rule changes for the Planning Commission that would allow simplified handling of some straightforward applications.

Items likely to be a little more controversial are:

• The City Manager’s Day Laborer Report. Given the extent to which this issue has been heating up of late, this could be pretty interesting.
• A public hearing on the “One Hundred and Twenty (120) Day Deferral on Redevelopment of Multi-Family Dwellings“. I’ve written about this before, as has the Gazette, and I suspect that I’ll have another post about it before Monday.

The City has posted the agenda for the Septemer 20, 2006 Planning Commission meeting. It contains two items:

• AFP-06-035 — 441 Lynette Street in Lakelands
• AFP-06-037 — Sterigenics

The City has posted it’s draft Consolidated Annual Performance Evaluation Report (CAPER). From the announcement:

The City of Gaithersburg has completed its draft Consolidated Annual Performance Evaluation Report (CAPER) for the period July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006, which it is required to submit as a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) entitlement community and a Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS (HOPWA) formula grantee. During the period covered by the report, Gaithersburg received a CDBG award of $517,174 to address the following national objectives and goals set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): to provide decent housing, a suitable living environment, and expanded economic opportunities, principally for low-to-moderate-income persons. In addition, $535,000 in HOPWA formula funds was available for the Bethesda-Frederick-Gaithersburg Metropolitan Division to address the housing and related service needs of low-income persons with HIV/AIDS in Montgomery and Frederick Counties.

If anyone actually reads this, please let us know what you think in the comments…

The City has posted an announcement for a joint work session on SDP-04-001: Quince Orchard Park, 9/25/2006:

SDP-04-001 – Schematic Development Plan for Quince Orchard Park, The Vistas, Mixed Housing Development, Including 13 Single Family Detached units, 38 Townhouses and 32 (2 over 2) Condominium Units

This has, as you can tell from the SDP number, been kicking around since early in 2004. The earliest mention of it I can find is from a December 6, 2006 Mayor and Council meeting [Agenda, Video, Minutes, Background Materials]. Best I can tell from the locater map, this is a picture of the lot and here is an aerial view. According to Jaime Ciavarra’s report in the Gazette, this didn’t go all that well:

A proposed community for Quince Orchard Park in western Gaithersburg is getting the thumbs down from neighbors who say the design includes too much housing and lacks green space and amenities.

Less than 10 people spoke out against the proposal at a public hearing Monday night, saying the developer’s plan for “The Vistas,” 125 housing units on 13 acres, will congest residential streets and leave future homeowners little green area to call their own.

The next time it showed up was the April 11, 2005 joint work session [Agenda, Video, Background Materials] (no minutes). Again, Jaime Ciavarra reported that all was not well:

“What you’ve created is putting homes in every possible place you can put one, and some areas where you couldn’t put them in, you fit them in anyway,” Mayor Sidney A. Katz said at a work session Monday night. “Consequently, it’s just not a good plan.”

According to agendas for the May 8, 2006 and May 15, 2006 Council sessions, there was supposed to be another hearing on May 30, 2006. However, it was not included in the May 30 agenda. This time, for the September 25, 2006 work session, the City has provided just 11 days notice. In addition to the standalone announcement linked above, mention is also included in the agenda for next Monday’s Council meeting. No background materials have yet been posted, so I don’t know any more about what is being proposed, but I do have a couple of questions:

• Does the proposal include any “affordable housing units”?
• Why are condos being proposed? What we heard at the work session [Agenda, Video, Background Materials] on the East Diamond Ave rental behemoth was that the condo market had gone cold.