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The video for last night’s joint work session of the Mayor & Council and Planning Commission is now online. This was a short meeting, only about 45 minutes. A motion to hold a closed executive session passed, the traffic impact standards document was quickly introduced, and the bulk of the meeting concerned the Vistas. Generally, the Mayor, Council and Planning Commission were much happier with the proposal than they had been with previous iterations. The primary concern was with the structure of the homeowner’s association, whether they would merge with the Quince Orchard Park HOA or be a standalone HOA just for their relatively small development. There appeared to be reluctance to approve the plan unless the new homes could become part of the QOP HOA. Regarding affordable housing, while there were no provisions for it in the current plan, it was stated that if the affordable housing ordinance went into effect before the Vistas SDP could be approved, then the new ordinance would apply to the new development. Given the status of the project review, it seemed unlikely that the the SDP would be approved in time.

The closed executive session was, of course, closed and I can find no reports on what happened.

Update: The Gazette has an article on this : Vistas Housing Project Slowed by Confusion

I wrote about the Vistas once before, when the public hearing was first announced. That public hearing is scheduled for tomorrow evening (Monday, September 25, 2006), and I’ve just noticed that the background materials for that hearing have been posted. I’m guessing that they went up late Thursday or early Friday, as the internal time stamp on the third of the three PDFs is around close of business on Thursday. The three PDFs can be found here, here and here.

As is usual with the PDFs from the City planning department, they contain only images of the pages submitted, rather than machine-readable text of the content of those pages. Thus it can be a bit of a challenge to read it through looking for specific content. The non-free professional version of Acrobat does, however, have an OCR (optical character recognition) feature that can be used to quickly scan the documents for images of text. I’ve done this with these three documents and I’ve found that, within the ability of the software to recognize text, it was not able to find the strings “MPDU” or “moderately priced dwelling unit”. I did find a single instance of the word “affordable” in the first of the three documents, on page 24 in a discussion of densities:

We understand that there are economic and other pressures (such as keeping housing more affordable) that may militate toward a somewhat more dense mix in the Vistas. Indeed, the Board and the Committee are generally comfortable with the portion of this design that uses high-density condominiums along Orchard Ridge Road, with the possible exception of the Condominium structure planned for the comer of Winter walk Drive and Orchard Ridge.

However, there is a strong community feeling that more downward movement in the density numbers is needed.

If there is significant interest in the OCR’d versions of these PDFs please mention it in the comments or by email and I’ll consider posting them. I’ve pasted in a few images from the background PDFs:

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 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.