This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

MVGC Development: The Suicide of A Community

When one hears about a new tragedy, there is always a second guessing on whether there was something that could have been done to prevent it.  Usually there are no signs of crazy behavior – the actions all seemed most logical and normal. If the tragedy is a suicide victim the recriminations come faster.  Little things are remembered that should have been noticed.  Ten minutes to send an email might have been all it took to prevent the death of the victim, but at the time we were all so busy!  The parallel in the life of a community can be stark, with moments that we look back on and wonder, why didn’t think to stop it back then?

This year Montgomery Village is involved with not just one, but two significant decisions, and possibly even a third.  The first is the potential build of the Mid County Highway (M83) that has arisen from the ashes like the phoenix, The second is the development of homes on the 140 acres of green fairways that now make up the golf course.  The third decision is the redevelopment of the Village Center into a multi-use working/living/shopping downtown.  Each of these have parallels and similarities, but in all three cases the lack of unity is creating the opening for developers and outside forces to get what they want instead of what many residents in the village say they want.

The attempt by the county’s transportation consultants and developers to bring M-83 back is advertised as a solution to the heavy traffic that up-county residents face, but comes at the expense of trees and backyards of Montgomery Village residents.  They do not deserve their properties destroyed because the up-county area was developed without adding capacity on MD-355 north of Milestone and the County added the stupid left-turn lanes to accommodate the County Fair traffic that comes in only 8 days out of a year.  Some of the other alternatives proposed would save the woods on the west side of Montgomery Village but push a 4 to 6 lane highway over onto the east side of the village.  This set of options, Alternatives 9 and 4, divided the village community into two competing groups, and took the united pressure off of the transportation planners and politicians.   Score a loss for residents and a win for the developers. 

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The proposal to build homes on the Montgomery Village Golf Course by another developer, even one with nice briefings and images of the park they would leave on the unbuildable wetlands portions of the property, further fractured the community.  Unfortunately some people consider the property development as inevitable, and are willing to throw their neighboring subdivision under the non-existent bus of fate and “improved property values.”  The bulldozers that plow over the fairways are no less real than those that threaten to build the highways, but somehow the view of the forest is more important than the views filled with grass.   It was a masterwork of political engineering – the developer has divided the community and reduced the message of the opposition to “NIMBY” all the while knowing that their plans to build hundreds of townhouses gained credibility by being the only plan on the table.  By continuing to tell everyone that there was no future for golf in the community they actually have some that live right on the golf course considering a vote for the development since it is the only “alternative” that was presented for consideration.  Montgomery Village will pay the price in fleeing residents, sales competition with the new homes, falling home prices, added traffic and even a mention of widening of Montgomery Village Avenue in order to solve its traffic problems and support the new homes being built.  If the consequences were any less awful for the Village, one could almost applaud the manipulation.  Score another loss for the residents. 

This brings us to the third decision, to allow development of the Village Center.  This area of the Village is the real key to the rebirth of Montgomery Village.  If properly done it would have a nice mix of added residential units and office buildings, with daytime jobs and evening residents to bring business patrons to the center.  With some anchors like a health club, karate and dance schools, theatre or bowling alley, and a grocery store along with a mix of eclectic shops and restaurants the new Village Center would be a magnet for new home buyers and would allow retiring residents a new high-end community to buy into and happily remain local.  But the community is now rousing to prevent development at any cost because that is the only way to limit the loss of the open green spaces in the middle of the Village, thus resulting in further division and the likely outcome of not enabling the full redevelopment of the shopping center.  Strike three for the residents.  That’s a full strike out.

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For some leaders or citizens the results may look like a bittersweet victory – but the benefits will be short lived.  Within a few years of all this activity the “new” Village will look like all the other parts of the county – crowded new townhouses and crowded roads.  No longer will the trees and open green spaces welcome its residents, and the bulldozing and redevelopment of Montgomery Village will have been completed.  The Village may still be debt-free and have an IB High school, but the era will be remembered instead for the loss of the golf course.

Of course, MCDOT and the developers are getting a lot of help.  Montgomery Village newspapers carry front page columns helping sell the plans instead of coming  up with creative alternatives, and most of the local Homes Corporations are ignoring their chance to stop the bulldozers.  The new Golf Course owner even complained publicly that no one from MVF has approached him to suggest alternatives.  What should have been a concerted effort to pull out all stops and block both the new highway and save the golf course with a creative solution was lost as the time was spent arguing about how to punish residents that tried to remodel their aging homes.  The MVF board even approved a transportation policy that supports widening of Muncaster Mill Road and Goshen Road someday, offering thoroughfares for outsides instead of solutions that solve our own problems instead.  Meanwhile acres of open green space, thousands of trees, and the backyards of other neighbors will be lost because some people saw these developments as “inevitable” even though their complicity and votes were required in order to make it possible.  The benefits will include commuters zipping through the neighborhoods while our kids try to walk to school, more townhouses, more new banks and pharmacies, and more congestion.  Retirees will continue to flee the area they once loved, following the examples of those that went before them. 

To prevent the suicide of the community I walk each day passing out leaflets asking the village to wake up and help save their neighborhood.  I want to shout out as I walk that we can do better.  Please Email the Village leadership at mvinfo@mvf.org and ask them to save the fairways.  Come to the Lake Marion Center on Thursday March 6 at 7:30pm and speak against the loss of the golf course.  Come out to South Valley Park and walk the proposed M-83 routes at 1:30pm on Sat. March 1 with the TAME coalition, then go home and email the county council and ask them to improve MD-355 north of Milestone instead.  Walk around the Village Center this weekend and visit a local shop owner, buy something, and ask them to join a real dialogue with the MVF leadership about the future of the center.  No neighbor of ours in the community deserves a bulldozer in their backyard today, and unless we stand together it might even be your backyard tomorrow.  Intervention is everyone’s responsibility, and after the tragic ending it is too late.

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