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Patricia Murret and Audrey Dutton write:

Two important figures in Montgomery County government —County Councilwoman Marilyn J. Praisner and Planning Board Commissioner Eugene Lynch — have died.

According to the County Council agenda for next Tuesday, January 22:

10:45 BRIEFING - County Property Use Initiative, a proposal to relocate services from Public Safety Training Academy (PSTA) and County Service Park to GE/Edison Tech Park in Gaithersburg

This meeting will be televised live on CCM Channels Comcast 6, RCN 6, and Verizon 30; repeated on 1/25/08 at 8 pm.

This page has information on additional ways to hear and see this session.

Gaithersblog readers may recall my earlier posts on this topic. Additionally, a Gaithersblog reader has pointed out to me that one of the primary uses the County has in mind for this property — County Liquor and School Cafeteria distribution warehouses — may in fact not be allowed under the current zoning (I-3) for this property. According to the City Code, Part II, Chapter 24, Article III, Division 15, I-3 Zone, Section 24-143 (emphasis mine):

(2)	Public buildings and uses subject to the following requirements:
	(a)	The minimum lot or parcel area shall be at least twenty (20) acres in size.
	(b)	No on-site parking or storage of trucks, either within a building or on the exterior, or motor vehicles other than automobiles for employees and customers of the facility are allowed.
	(c)	All parking areas shall be set back at least fifty (50) feet from any common property line or public right-of-way and shall be screened by fencing or planting at least four (4) feet in height.
	(d)	No distribution uses are allowed. For the purpose of this section “distribution uses” is defined as the primary use of the property for the collection and transfer or dispensing of personal property or equipment to public or private recipients.

Note this restriction on distribution uses only applies to public buildings and uses, and therefore the current Peapod grocery distribution warehouse is not excluded under this rule.

The County is currently asserting that they are not subject to City zoning — Ike Leggett said so in response to a question in his call-in show last month, and County Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Diane Schwartz Jones said as much in her presentation at the January 7 City Council Meeting. But for them to come in and blatantly violate not just the spirit but the letter of the City’s ordinances right from the get-go, is pretty offensive in my opinion.

In my mind, this raises the question of whether there will be any sort of controls whatsoever on that property once it is taken over by the County. If the County believes that the City’s zoning doesn’t apply, and the County doesn’t have any zoning for that property because it is outside the jurisdiction of M-NCPPC, would this not mean that the County can do just whatever it likes there? All the assurances that the County might be making about the compatibility of their activities on that property have to be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

Folks, I think that the City of Gaithersburg is about to get 100 acres smaller.

• Margie Hyslop writes: Local bills await governor’s signature

  Among the bills passed by the General Assembly and needing Gov. Martin O’Malley’s signature to become law are measures that would:

  *Prohibit Montgomery County from levying a special property tax on residents of Gaithersburg, Rockville and Washington Grove for maintenance and use of county parks, recreation facilities and programs.

  Montgomery and Prince George’s County Councils and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which runs the two counties’ parks and programs, would be required to issue a report to the state legislature that analyzes user fees for parks and related services in the counties and municipalities. The municipalities, which operate their own parks and programs, argued that their residents should not be taxed twice.

• Chris Robinson writes: Still time to comment on absentee ballot availability

  The revision would allow absentee ballots for city elections without providing a reason. The Ad Hoc Election Participation Advisory Committee and Board of Supervisors of Elections suggested the revision during a public work session in March.

• Sebastian Montes writes: Goshen homes nearing historic status

  ‘‘When we came through a couple years ago, this place was in ruins,” said Joanne Atay, vice-chairwoman of the Goshen Historical Preservation Society, which has been pushing the county for years to grant the Black and White Inn historical status.

  They marvel at its greatly restored state. But the immediate thrill is overshadowed by the deep relief from their years of work finally bearing fruit: the Black and White Inn, along with three other homes in Goshen, could at last win the protections of historical designation as early as this summer.

  Those four Goshen homes would be the first African-American homes to be individually added to the historical atlas created in 1976.

In today’s Washington Post “Montgomery Extra”, Miranda S. Spivack has an article about political developments regarding the Metropolitan District Tax:

A panel being set up by County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) to examine how to pay for services provided by Montgomery County’s municipalities and the county government is likely to consider a new system of paying for the county’s regional park system.

The regional park system has been losing income in recent years as the cities began annexing property from the county’s unincorporated areas, with County Council permission, and then taxed those residents for city-run parks. The side effect was to decrease the tax base for the county’s Department of Park and Planning.

Residents of the county’s unincorporated areas pay a special tax to help subsidize neighborhood and regional parks run by the county parks department. Montgomery County has a multi-layered system of parks and local government, with some parks run by the cities and others run by the parks agency, which reports to the County Council and is governed by a bi-county commission shared with neighboring Prince George’s County.

Current law bars the county from collecting a parks tax from residents who live inside city boundaries set by 1965. But it allows the county to collect from annexed sections of cities, even though the county has not done that.

Of course, there appears to be no parallel law that allows the cities to tax the county residents for the use of City parks.

Early this month, Montgomery’s House delegation in the General Assembly unanimously approved a bill that would bar the county from collecting a parks tax from city residents. It was sponsored by lawmakers from District 17, which includes Gaithersburg and Rockville, and could affect about 21,000 taxpayers in those cities. The bill is now before the Senate delegation for consideration.

My understanding is that the bill is actually winding its way through multiple levels committees and subcommittees in Annapolis. Assistant City Manager Fred Felton has been instrumental in shepherding the bill through this process.

County Council President Marilyn Praisner doesn’t much like the bill; she’d prefer that everyone just cool off and trust that the County will be reasonable:

“We are saying, ‘Don’t bother now.’ . . . Maybe in the future the Metropolitan District Tax will be the vehicle for whatever we agree to, and we don’t know what that is at this point,” Praisner said. “Nobody is under any risk. We aren’t going to collect the tax now.”

Note that she says “now” — she isn’t saying that the tax won’t be collected in the future. Given the level of difficulty of getting a bill through Annapolis, it isn’t like the cities can just wait and see what the County’s intentions are, and quick get this bill passed if things go badly. To my knowledge, the impetus for this bill came when the County started asking the Cities for a list of properties to which they could apply this tax. Quoting an October 2006 Gazette story by Jaime Ciavarra:

The county’s Department of Finance sent Gaithersburg officials a letter in early September, asking them to provide a list of properties annexed after 1965, when the Maryland General Assembly approved the metropolitan district tax to provide park revenue.

‘‘The theory is, and it’s a logical one, that people who live in King Farm are still going to camp at Little Bennett or go boating at Black Hill and still enjoy all of the resources that these county parks provide,” said Marion Joyce, spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Park and Planning.

Skeptical about how the tax’s revenues would benefit Gaithersburg residents, City Manager David B. Humpton sent a letter to county officials earlier this month questioning the county’s rationale and legal reasoning for the tax and asking for more discussion or a public hearing before such a levy would be implemented.

‘‘The city, obviously, provides its own city parks that I believe many county residents also use. And we don’t tax them for that,” said Mayor Sidney A. Katz.

Dena Levitz also wrote an article on this topic in the Examner about a week ago, mostly reporting MNCPPC’s point of view on the subject.