Testimony Before the Planning Board

June 28, 2007

Wendy Shore

17935 Pond Road

Ashton, MD 20861

301 356-4900

Ashton Meeting Place

Preliminary Plan No. 120050060

Site Plan No. 820070100

Most of the testimony you will hear today is pretty detailed and legalistic. I do not have a legal background, and rather than try to argue in that manner, I am speak simply as a member of the Ashton community.

I may not have a legal background, but I do have common sense.  I cannot argue the fine legal points about when a parking garage is not a parking garage, but I can tell you that a 268 foot long, 30 foot high wall is not anything like what is found in a rural village, and painting windows on it is putting lipstick on a pig.  Drive around the back of any grocery store and see if you can convince yourself that it is charming - or that it looks like a traditional village. Yet that is what the developers would have us believe.

It also concerns me that although all the illustrations of AMP show trees that are about 30 feet high, in fact their plan calls for ALL the trees they plant to be one or two-gallon size. That is a maximum hip-high and about 1/2 inch in diameter. A commercial site with nothing but teeny tree is hardly “a beautiful thing”.

I gather that the county has the ability to determine whether public need outweighs other considerations such as environmental impact, and it seems that the developers would like you to believe that there is a public need for this development, in spite of the fact that there are large "shopping opportunities" within 4 miles of this site in every direction but North. The developers would have you believe that Ashton wants and needs another shopping opportunity. I am here to tell you that I have attended numerous meetings in which the community repeatedly told the developer that we do NOT want this shopping opportunity, thank you very much. If the developers truly want to serve the community, they should build what they have repeatedly been told we DO want: a small scale, rural village type of development that actually is beautiful and really does encourage pedestrian traffic. 

All of us who live in Ashton could live somewhere else. In Montgomery County there are almost limitless opportunities to live within a few hundred feet of commercial development.  Those of us who chose Ashton obviously do not wish to do so, and we have trusted that the Master Plan would, as it states on pages 80 and 81, “ensure the continuation of land uses and patterns that characterize rural settlements” and “maintain the existing scale and exclude new auto-oriented or large-scale uses that are inconsistent with traditional rural development patterns”.

Our 4 corners are among the last in Montgomery County that have not been turned into 4 corners of strip malls and grocery stores as Olney and Cloverly and Gaithersburg have.  They, too, were once like Ashton. 

We neither need nor want a large commercial development that is vastly out of scale with everything else in the area, will adversely affect traffic, and, to add insult to injury, is devoid of decent size trees.  Please do not approve this development.