Glenn Dale Citizens Association

Meeting Minutes – March 15, 2005

Prepared By Jim Titus, Secretary

All officers attended except for the Vice President.

President Henry Wixon called the meeting to order at 7:48 PM. Meeting was attended by all officers except Vice President, plus Lillian Becker, Tonya Spears, Jim Wolf and one other whose names I neglected to write down. Next month’s minutes will list attendance. Although the minutes are on the web, no one brought a paper copy. John Shields offered to bring hard copies next time.

None.

The County Council will review the Glenn Dale Golf Course, sitting as a district council. Under the code, it must be called up within 30 days—but need never be acted on. Several people speculated that the Council would not make a decision until after the East Glenn Dale Sector Plan has been revised.

We got a notice of appeal in 4-04142. No one knew what that case referred to. We’ll try to include the numbers in the minutes so that when the county sends notices with dockets and no names, we’ll know what they are talking about.

Zoglio Property Cluster Decision—still on hold. They will now have to pass the new public facilities test. John Shields: On public safety portion, they will be able to pay $6,000 per lot in lieu of passing a test for public safety. This goes into the general budget of the County. In addition, they must contribute $12,400 per house for education.

City of Bowie. Series of reviews of the Bowie-Collington Master Plan. Henry read the schedule. April 2 at 8PM is the first public hearing. This is City Council hearing. Work session on April 7 at 8PM. A second Bowie Advisory Planning Board on April 14, April 25, April 26. City Council Hearing on Monday May 2 at 8PM. Joint Hearing on May 17 at 7PM. What is interested for Bowie Plan: They plan a beltway around the City of Bowie.

Livable Communities Initiative. Jack Johnson invited us to a tree-planting event: Peace Tree Project. Deadline March 22. Joyce Beck 301-772-4880 or jbeck@co.pg.md.us.

Beachtree Community Recreation Center. Near Leland Rd and US-301. SDP#0412 Contact MNCPPC to be a person of record.

We have received a request to file our annual tax return. Lil volunteered to do it again.

Wed March 9, 2005. The meeting had 40-50 attendees. Henry Wixon’s account: The Park and Planning reps gave overview of zoning. Everyone broke into groups considering all the topics. People discussed where they thought the community was going, and people gave reports back to eachother.

Henry read one of those small-group reports. People want: Maintain park-like character of Greenbelt Rd. Plan for increased traffic flow. Restore the crossing of Hilmeade Road over the Amtrak lines with a new bridge. (Henry editorialized: that will never happen.) Public facilities. No density greater than rural residential. No more warehouses. Some people talked about connecting trails. Someone said add a MARC stop. (Henry editorialized—it will never happen; Titus editorialized: planning for a MARC station is a good idea because some day there may be a 4^th track or a some other type of rail along this corridor and if you can’t plan for mass transit along a rail line, where can you?)

John Shields: The overall theme was: Traffic is an issue. Correct it or stop approving development. Keep land at RR or larger lots. No one said anything about the golf course—perhaps because there was a Shields in every group. John added. A woefully inadequate amount of time—they rushed the thing and forced people to come up with conclusions. This too little time. It was also unbalanced, the P&P took 75 minutes to do their presentations.

The obvious question is: Should people make this point at the meeting tomorrow? Previous area master plans have involved many meetings.

Another critique. People do not know about the rules about what goes into the planning process.

Tomorrow at the fire station. We’ll talk about Northern East Glenn Dale, plus bike-pedestrian for the entire area because Fred Shaffer missed the March 9 meeting.

Post workshop meeting will be April 6 @ 7PM.

Glenn Dale Hospital. St. Paul/developer came back with another proposal. Henry chatted with them, and they will give us a presentation. Chuck Montrie of MNCPPC said they would put out an RFQ to see if people are qualified to do something on the hospital. This is interesting, given the trouble of getting things out on MNCPPC in the past.

The rumor mill reports: The Chairman of MNCPPC is on her way out, so now MNCPPC can move forward on matters with Glenn Dale that were never going to happen. So far, MNCPPC is not talking about changing the law.

Trails: Jim Titus gave an update to the ICC and Folly Branch trail issues. We will continue to try to get our representatives to push the trail within the General Assembly. Leo Greene is supportive, but he needs to work within the Senate, rather than trying to persuade Secretary Flanagan. On the Folly Branch trail, our next step will be to go to budget hearings and ask for money to be put into the budget for the trails. We agreed that we are not going to pass a new resolution each month for the ICC, Folly Branch, and WB&A Trails.

John Shields: We need to invite people to come and tell us how to achieve what we want. Glenn Dale Forest. We thought we had these various objectives achieved—but it didn’t happen because we did not phrase things correctly. Now, Glenn Dale Forest has asked for an easement onto the Golf Course so that traffic would not back up. The problem is that those conditions typically only apply if a property owner voluntarily gives it up.

Web Site. Lil got ahold of the lady who was doing our web site. We will buy two more years of space and she will start working on our web site again.

John: Senator Leo Greene puts in a bill each year to make false testimony before a committee to be perjury. It made it out of committee this year. But we don’t know the bill number.

Treasurer Report: 1593.29 now up to 1614.46, including $3 and interest.

Adjourned at 8:40.

BP Daniel Lynch. Site Bell Station and MD-450. Proposal to do a gas station for BP. The station—as they envision it—will have entrances on both Bell Station and Md-450. They have a fairly detailed plan for the gas station, but not for the rest of the Palumbo property, on which the BP station will sit. BP itself is getting out—it will be [Eastern Petroleum or a similar name] but the logo on the station will say BP.

They have not thought about the impact on the Md-450 trail, and Fred Shaffer has not given them any comments. This station is on property owned by the Palumbos. The diagram does not show the property as going all the way to MD-193. Just Bell Station and MD-450. Some of us had been thinking that the property had frontage on Glenn Dale Road—but the plans we saw tonight said otherwise.

Dave Adler. Coscan (sp?) Limited Partnership. They generally work in the Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis area. They recently built a property at MD-18 and BW-Pkwy of 3700 homes called "Russet".

He started talking to St. Paul’s. It became clear to him that some of the existing buildings could be renovated for 62+, and then develop a 50+ or 55+ community, with club house and amenities. They spoke conceptually. They had the idea of golf course—but that won’t work since it uses up the land.

They showed us a "conceptual plan". The key points appear to be as follows:

1. Restore the Largest Three buildings nearest Glenn Dale Rd, two on the east side, one on the west—plus the little house on the east side.
2. Rental property for age 62+ in the old buildings run by St. Paul. That operation will have 10 acres
3. Approximately 220 small detached homes on 50 X 100 foot lots on the east side of Glenn Dale Road, over the ridge and hence not really visible from Glenn Dale Rd.
4. About 40 units would be in the wooded area adjacent to Strawberry Glenn, requiring about half the wooded area between WB&A and Strawberry Glenn to be converted to residential. (But we had the sense that they might be willing to save those trees and put the homes on the east wide of the WB&A.)
5. Only 60 acres will be built.
6. They need statute to be changed from CCRI to [I can’t remember the term but basically age 55+] since this will not be CCRI. That zoning designation allows 8 homes per acre; so we are looking at a total of 480 housing units.
7. They want the statute changed this year. The developer said that if he can’t get the statute changed this year, he does not want to spend any time on the project, because usually he does not work on development projects that require a statutory change. Several members agreed with them that this is urgent.... I told them I was skeptical because it is so late in the legislative session, and they have neither the public nor the Council on board yet. I suggested they work on community and county support, so that they can get statute changed next year. The lawyer told me that they have Hendershot on board and that the council should go along with it since it is in Hendershot’s district. He said that it is not Peters’ concern since it is not in his district. I tried to persuade him that the hospital is partly in Peters district, but to no avail.
8. The 440 units will have an outlet onto Md-450 and two outlets onto Glenn Dale Rd. They seemed willing to consider only having outlets on Md-450 and the part of Glenn Dale Rd near MD-450 so that the traffic will not be encouraged on Glenn Dale Rd. To get such a long cul-de-sac approved, we would need some paved bike trails that emergency vehicles could use, connecting them to Old Pond Rd. That would be desirable anyway. The other 40 units would have road access to Glenn Dale Rd.
9. They had not thought about footpaths connecting various areas to eachother—but seemed open to it.
10. The proposal looks like a 60-acre floating zone, in which a flat area for a ball field would be preserved, but otherwise the most developable 60 acres would be sought.
11. [Titus analysis] We now have two plausible scenarios floating around for the fate of Glenn Dale hospital. Tonight we heard about developing 60 acres with 480 units in a facility similar—albeit not identical—to what the plan and statute contemplate. The competing scenario is some sort of mild golf-course swap resulting from the East Glenn Dale Sector Plan, with fewer units, and loss of the historic buildings, and a more standard development on 60 acres. Of course, the outcome of the East Glenn Dale sector plan is not precisely clear, but if it results a more modest swap proposal, the choice may come down to (a) St. Paul’s giving us 220 homes on 60 acres and preserving the buildings with a retirement community, versus (b) Toll or their successors giving us 220 conventional homes on 60 acres, tearing the buildings down but saving the golf course. Historic preservation versus saving the golf course is a theme we thought we heard last year—but it turned out that we had viable proposals for neither. We may soon have viable proposals for both.