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From the City’s website:

Police to Conduct SWAT Training at Former Broadstone Apartments
Posted 12/12/2007

The Gaithersburg and Montgomery County Police Departments will be conducting a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) training course at the former Broadstone Apartment complex located at the corner of West Deer Park Road and South Frederick Avenue. This complex has been approved for redevelopment and will be demolished in the near future.

SWAT training will take place at the complex daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday, December 19 through Saturday, December 22, 2007.

The vacant apartments provide an excellent opportunity for realistic training, and will contribute to the readiness of regional police agencies to respond to emergency situations. A portion of this training will involve the use of explosives in small quantities under very controlled conditions. The muffled sounds of the explosives may be heard within the neighborhood throughout the training.

The sponsor of the training course and the police department has taken all necessary precautions to ensure that this training will in no way be hazardous to the community. It is being conducted by trained and certified professionals and has been designed with an emphasis on safety.

For additional information please contact Lieutenant Thomas Campbell of the Gaithersburg Police Department at 301-258-6400 or tcampbell@gaithersburgmd.gov.

Update: The video of this call-in show can be found here.

From the County’s website:

Residents can view Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett and County Council President Mike Knapp during a live, televised call-in show on Tuesday, December 18 from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. on County Cable Montgomery — Channel 6 on Comcast and RCN, and Channel 30 on Verizon. Leggett and Knapp will answer residents’ questions on any topic of local concern. Residents can call 240-777-6540 with their questions anytime before or during the show.

It will be interesting if they actually will answer any question of local concern. One thing I’m particularly interested in at this point is what the County’s plans are for the GE Tech Park. Will the County, by purchasing a good-sized chunk of land in the City, cut off the City’s tax revenue stream for that property, and in net effect — as it is arguable whether the City has any zoning authority over the County — de-annex a property that was annexed into the City about eighteen years ago? The GE Tech Park property is currently assessed at $19,201,800, on which the City’s portion of the property taxes is $40,707.82. If the County buys that land, the City would not be able to collect these taxes, which would likely be much higher if that property is redeveloped by a commercial entity. If this deal goes through, will the the City receive any compensation for this loss? And beyond these financial issues are questions of the long-term use of this property if the County has no one to answer to but themselves with regard to what they do there. According to the Gazette,

The county police department headquarters would move to the building, along with Public Service Training Academy classrooms and the 1st District police station. The county Board of Elections would also be moved there.

In addition to the six-story building, there is also a 240,000-square-foot warehouse on the property owned by Finmarc Management Inc., which is leased to Giant Food Inc. for its Peapod delivery service. That building would be adapted to hold an expanded, climate-controlled primary warehouse for the Department of Liquor Control. The MCPS food warehouse would be built nearby.

But these are, of course, just tentative plans for the short term. As we saw with the Crabbs Branch Day Laborer Center, if the County decides they want to do something, they just go ahead and do it, so no one should look at these tentative, public plans as representing any sort of limits on what the County will actually do there.