Hard Lessons of Progress : Voters in Two East Coast Counties Find That It’s Not Always Possible to Seize Control of Their Destinies

Late for a meeting in Washington, a harried-looking Bill White scrambles to find change at a suburban Metro subway station.

“Every morning I face a dilemma,” he says. “I can stop the car at the parking lot for the Metro station, or I can keep driving.”

Most days, White, a lawyer, chooses the subway to get to his office in downtown Washington.

Nearby, traffic clogs the intersection of Old Georgetown Road and Wisconsin Avenue. There’s a steady drone of jackhammers and pile drivers. The old shopping district here has been upstaged by shining towers, including a Hyatt Regency hotel and a Wang Laboratories building. Farther up Old Georgetown Road, at Interstate 270, Montgomery County officials have frozen development along a 7-mile stretch of highway.

Welcome to Montgomery County, Md.

Similar Measures

It has been 14 years since this county’s elected leaders, determined to hold off the advancing urban sprawl that even then was sweeping into the suburbs surrounding the nation’s capital, passed the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance. Strikingly similar to the Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative on the June ballot in Orange County, the ordinance was designed to ensure a rate of growth that would keep traffic at manageable levels and public facilities functioning smoothly.

Today, however, after years of experience and fine-tuning through amendments in 1982 and 1986, the Montgomery County ordinance gets mixed reviews. Seven areas of the county now are under building moratoriums that have delayed major development projects until new roads can be built.

Comparisons of trends in Montgomery County with statistics for surrounding areas show that employment and housing prices have not been significantly affected by the ordinance, and employment figures in fact are up.

Law’s Lessons

Urban planners and Montgomery County officials agree that the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance has given the county a slightly better traffic situation than nearby Fairfax County, which has more people and traffic generated by Dulles International Airport.

But there is one lesson that Montgomery County officials have learned particularly well over the past 14 years. They know now that they cannot seize control of the destiny of their county through growth controls and guide it where they would. For they cannot control what goes on in the cities and counties around them.

“The ordinance has pushed some development into adjoining counties, and then they dump some of their traffic on us. . . . We’ve been grappling with this problem, but so far we have not found a solution,” says Kenneth Orski, a Washington-based urban planning consultant who lives in Montgomery County.

Rockville, a city within Montgomery County, does not have growth controls and thus has helped add more traffic to the major arterial roads and the Capital Beltway crossing the county. Likewise, neighboring counties generally have allowed growth to continue unabated, dumping more traffic into the regional road network.

While traffic flow in some parts of Montgomery County has improved, in others--like downtown Bethesda--it has been getting worse every year despite the growth ordinance.

The ordinance “has not succeeded in keeping traffic congestion away from our roads,” says Orski, who developed the Irvine Co.’s traffic reduction plan for the Spectrum business complex at the junction of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways in Irvine.

‘Better Than Nothing’

But Orski still endorses the Montgomery County ordinance.

“It’s better than nothing,” he says. “Traffic is only marginally better here than in Fairfax County, Va., which has had laissez-faire growth policies, but that’s something.”

Montgomery County was among the first of several hundred communities across the United States that adopted growth controls in the 1970s. Environmental concerns and water shortages played a role in the county council’s decisions to impose those controls. There was also concern about overburdened sewer systems in the face of continuing construction.

Unlike some areas, however, Montgomery County chose to limit growth by tying development to the availability of new roads and other public facilities--rather than by imposing an annual percentage cap on population growth, as Boulder, Colo., does.

Now, a second wave of slow-growth fervor is washing across the country, driven by public outrage over traffic congestion. Washington-based Population Environment Balance Inc., an environmental group, estimates that about 1,700 communities in the United States have growth controls.

California has led the latest charge, with at least 64 local growth-control measures in effect as of December, says the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Last year alone, 38 growth-control measures were on local ballots around the state, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. Another dozen have been added in the first 2 1/2 months of 1988. And such measures have had an astounding 80% success rate at the polls.

‘Sweeping the Country’

“The slow-growth sentiment is sweeping the country,” says Mark Baldassare, UC Irvine-based pollster and professor of social ecology.

Montgomery County’s growth ordinance requires county planners to reject new subdivisions unless water supplies, sewage disposal facilities, roads, transit systems, schools, police and fire protection--even medical care--are sufficient to handle additional growth.

In addition, to implement the ordinance’s standards, the Montgomery County Planning Board has divided the county into community planning areas. Each of these areas has a “traffic shed,” similar in concept to a watershed. Proposed projects are analyzed to see if they will generate traffic in the planning area beyond certain levels.

Traffic volume is measured in terms of nationally defined “levels of service.” Montgomery County intersections are required to perform at Level of Service D. Generally, that means fewer than 1,525 vehicles should pass a measuring point in the most heavily congested lane during the peak hour of the commute period.

But Montgomery County’s Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance failed to take into account how much traffic would be added to the county’s road network by people passing through to Washington and other destinations from adjacent counties, says Norman Christeller, chairman of the County Planning Board.

Chris Neumann, senior transportation engineer at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, agrees that traffic is not quite as bad in Montgomery County as in nearby Fairfax County, Va.

“There aren’t any studies that compare traffic congestion in the two places directly,” says Neumann, “but we know that the greatest difference is on regular arterial highways. Montgomery County has done more to widen those roads. Many of them started at two lanes and are now six or eight lanes wide. Fairfax County is much further behind.”

Today, it is clear that projections from the mid-1970s of the amount of road construction needed to keep up with increasing traffic were off the mark. And funding and construction of new roads fell behind new building completions, while county officials continued to issue new building permits.

Consequently, approval of new construction projects has been temporarily halted in seven traffic sheds in Montgomery County, based on lack of road capacity. The communities affected are Germantown East and Germantown West, Cloverly, Damascus, Fairland-White Oak, Gaithersburg East and North Bethesda.

Perhaps no one is more familiar with these building moratoriums than Eugine M. Smith, vice president and operations manager for the Bethesda-based Artery Organization, a development firm whose advertising slogan is “Building for Your Future.”

Development Stalled

For more than two years, Smith has been trying to win county approval of his firm’s $500-million planned development known as Rock Spring Centre, along Interstate 270 north of Bethesda, where more than a dozen high-tech firms have located recently.

The project involves 2.1 million square feet of office space, a 500-room hotel, 800 high-rise apartments and 75,000 square feet of retail space.

County officials agree that the project is worthwhile because it is designed to bring residential and shopping areas closer to jobs, reducing the need for commuting. Smith’s firm even plans to offer several shuttle services to ferry people around.

But the 54-acre site stands empty because needed road improvements and the widening of the interstate are several years from completion.

In an effort to proceed with construction of Rock Spring Centre, Smith is trying to convince Christeller and other members of Montgomery County’s Planning Board that the local zoning for the project--or perhaps the method of calculating traffic impact--should be changed.

“There are certain portions of the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance that are particularly bothersome,” Smith says. “For example, their computer models of traffic impact are based on assigning a ratio of five workers per 1,000 square feet of office space. But our many years of experience have taught us that the real average is about 3.5 workers per 1,000 square feet, which means many fewer daily trips are generated.”

But even Smith says that, under the ordinance, traffic around Montgomery County is getting better in many places.

More developers are paying for road improvements required by the county before it will issue building permits, adding new road capacity at a time of critical need, Smith explains. A new state gasoline tax is also fueling a boom in new highway construction in the area, he says. And wherever new road capacity is added, there has been immediate relief.

But in some areas, such as downtown Bethesda, greater density has been encouraged because of the availability of the Metro subway, with road improvements lagging far behind.

“It’s just that there is deep frustration on the part of many developers because it’s taken some time to develop their projects,” Smith says.

Smith and others say, however, that construction delays caused by the ordinance have not resulted in higher rents for tenants or higher home prices for new buyers.

“It’s accepted as a control that’s in this area, and the result is probably less in the way of developers’ returns on their investment,” Smith says. “This is a highly desirable area, but so are communities in other counties nearby, so there’s a tendency to remain competitive.”

Fred Peacock, economist for the Maryland National Capitol Park and Planning Commission, which oversees the county’s land-use decisions, agrees.

“It hasn’t even been an issue,” Peacock says. “Last year we had the second-highest number of new housing units completed--9,675 units--that we’ve ever had, and the controls are now the tightest they’ve ever been.”

During the 1983 recession, Peacock adds, rents and housing prices actually decreased here.

As for the ordinance’s impact on jobs, both Smith and Christeller say employment figures have risen under the controls, and they point in particular to the fact that the ordinance allows denser development closer to Metro stations and other transit facilities. That has fueled a booming economy in those areas.

According to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional planning agency, Montgomery County’s unemployment rate has been influenced little or not at all by growth controls. That conclusion was reached by comparing Montgomery County unemployment statistics to those from nearby, growth-oriented Fairfax County, Va., and the District of Columbia.

In December, 1987, for example, Montgomery County’s unemployment rate stood at 2.2%, compared to the metropolitan region’s 2.9%, Fairfax County’s 1.8% and the District of Columbia’s 6%. The average for the so-called suburban ring around the District of Columbia was 2.3%.

In the previous two years, Montgomery County’s unemployment rate was lower than Fairfax County’s and also significantly better than the regional average.

That follows historical patterns, county officials say.

Even with moratoriums in effect in some communities, county officials say there is enough new construction already in the pipeline to generate 90,000 new jobs in the next five years. The county’s population increased by only 16,500, or 2.5%, in 1987.

Employment and Traffic

“Job growth could always be somewhat more without controls,” Peacock says. “But we have no idea what it would have been without them.”

The strong employment trend is one of the factors underlying the worsening traffic problems in downtown Bethesda, those who work there say.

At a Chevron station on Wisconsin Avenue, sandwiched between taller buildings, manager Al Coolick presides over two islands, 22 pumps and an apron crowded with harried motorists. A patch over his breast pocket says “Al.”

Coolick gets up before 5 a.m. to drive from nearby northern Virginia to his job, and he says it’s worth it to beat the traffic.

“I don’t know if it’ll get any better,” Coolick says. “I don’t see how it can.” He points down the block to a gang of workers rebuilding a bridge, forcing traffic on Wisconsin to squeeze from five lanes into two.

“They’re rebuilding it, but they’re not adding any lanes,” he says. “Like any metropolitan area, I guess people get numb to the traffic.”

HOW THE MEASURES COMPARE

Here’s how the Montgomery County, Md., Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance compares to the Orange County Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative:

The Montgomery County ordinance:

The County Planning Board must reject new development unless it finds that water supplies, sewage systems, roads, transit facilities, schools, police and fire services, and health clinics are adequate to serve it.

The ordinance does not directly address who must pay for needed roads or other facilities to allow a development to proceed. In most cases, however, the cost of holding the land forces developers to pay for the needed roads and other facilities themselves. After the ordinance was passed, the county council began imposing impact fees on developments to raise money for improvements needed to meet the ordinance’s standards.

Level of Service D is required for roads in urban areas and Level of Service C in rural areas. Levels of service are determined by counting traffic volume in the most congested lane of a road during the peak hour of the commute period. Level of Service E--a count of more than 1,525 vehicles in the most congested lane during the peak hour--would trigger a moratorium on Planning Board approval of any new development in the immediate area.

Commercial development projects under 10,000 square feet are exempted from the ordinance, as are public buildings such as schools and libraries.

Areas that are close to mass-transit facilities are allowed greater building density.

A secondary, more detailed review of a proposed development’s impact on local neighborhoods is required if the project will have a measurable impact on traffic at a given intersection, there is a nearby critical intersection operating at Level of Service D or worse, and the project would bring the level of approved development in the area to within 5% of the ceiling in the county’s master plan.

The Orange County Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative:

The County Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors would have to reject new development unless it met certain standards for roads, parks, flood control and police and fire protection. Improvements needed to meet the initiative’s standards would have to be completed within three years of occupancy of the project or five years of issuance of a grading or building permit.

Trust funds would be established to pay for needed improvements, but the initiative does not dictate who would pay into them. It is assumed that if the county could not pay for the improvements, developers would pay into the trust funds so they could proceed with their projects.

Level of Service C (defined as a stable flow with some delays) would be required for new road links, and Level of Service D (maximum average delay of 40 seconds per vehicle) would be required at all intersections. At existing road links and intersections that fail to meet those standards, development could proceed if improvements were made to reduce traffic by 1% of the average daily traffic volume there or to cut intersection delay by an average of half a second per vehicle.

Commercial buildings under 10,000 square feet, public structures and rehabilitation projects covering less than 50% of an existing structure are exempted from the initiative. Also exempted are projects that do not increase traffic by 1% of the average daily volume or add at least an average half a second of delay per vehicle on any link or at any intersection.

Projects must have drainage and flood-control facilities capable of handling the kind of heavy flooding expected to occur once every century.