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Monday, February 9, 2015

MCPS "blight" in Rockville Neigborhood

Do you know where MCPS stores desks and textbooks?
 
They don't store them in a warehouse. They store them in trailers in a Rockville neighborhood. Some of the trailers are even open to the elements.

Rockville Mayor Bridget Donnell Newton would like to clean up this MCPS "blight" on Stonestreet.

This MCPS property has been like this for decades.

This is how a $2.28 billion school system stores supplies?

Haven't seen this MCPS "storage" facility? Scroll down for two Google Earth images of this storage parking lot.

How would you like to look out and see this as your neighbor?



...She also said she would like to use a “blighted” Montgomery County Public Schools property on Stonestreet Avenue in Rockville, replacing trailers filled with old desks and textbooks with “brownstones fronting Stonestreet with garages and yards behind — adding needed and valuable housing and creating a more comfortable and pleasant walk from the neighborhoods to the Metro and Town Center.”...

 Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Calling cities like hers “energy centers for commerce, innovation, education and transportation,” Rockville Mayor Bridget Donnell Newton said issues such as finalizing the Rockville Pike Plan and dealing with proposals to change how the city calculates how development affects school capacity are at the top of its agenda.

The Rockville Pike Plan is one of the biggest and most exciting opportunities to help shape the city’s future, Newton said during her State of the City address Thursday night at the F.Scott Fitzgerald Theatre in Rockville.

The plan may have to be pared down from the original vision proposed by the city’s Planning Commission, “lest we discourage transit, bikes and all the good that will come from a walkable community,” Newton said.

But, with thoughtful planning, the new communities created or remade by the plan’s implementation along the Pike will help unite the eastern and western sides of the city, she said.

Newton also addressed the ongoing debate on whether the city should change the section of its adequate public facilities ordinance that limits how development affects school capacity.

Newton opposes a proposal that would align the city’s standards with Montgomery County’s, including changing the city’s threshold for when a school is over capacity from 110 percent to 120 percent of program capacity.

Newton said the testimony in two public hearings showed that while people want a vibrant city, they don’t want to put an extra burden on schools that are already overcrowded.

She said she believes the city should come up with alternative ways to solve the capacity issue.

“Is it using some of the 2 million square feet of vacant county office space? Is it requiring developers to pay a more realistic cost of that seat in the classroom? Is it moving boundaries? Or is it going to Annapolis with our county colleagues and delegation and negotiating a way to get our fair share?” Newton asked.

Newton also mentioned several projects she’d like the city to look at. They include putting Rockville Pike/Hungerford Drive underground at the Rockville Metro station to create a street-level plaza that would help connect the neighborhoods of East Rockville and Lincoln Park to the Town Center area.

She also said she would like to use a “blighted” Montgomery County Public Schools property on Stonestreet Avenue in Rockville, replacing trailers filled with old desks and textbooks with “brownstones fronting Stonestreet with garages and yards behind — adding needed and valuable housing and creating a more comfortable and pleasant walk from the neighborhoods to the Metro and Town Center.”

Acquiring the property would take coordination between the city and Montgomery County Public Schools, Newton said Monday.

rmarshall@gazette.net

https://web.archive.org/web/20150711184213/http://www.gazette.net/article/20150204/NEWS/150209750/1007/rockville-x2019-s-newton-outlines-successes-plans-for-city&template=gazette




7 comments:

  1. Relying on nature for temperature and humidity control. MCPS is going green!

    ReplyDelete
  2. So Montgomery County is forcing MCPS to relocate the bus depot, and Rockville is planning to force MCPS to relocate the trailers? (I imagine the warehouse as well?)

    Um..... Okaayyy.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You have missed the point of the trailers. There is NO warehouse! The trailers are used for storage.

      Delete
    2. Sorry, shouldn't have typed distracted. LOL

      I was referring to the rest of the MCPS property across Stonestreet, between Stonestreet and the train tracks; I can't remember offhand precisely what the East Rockville Plan calls for in every single piece of North & South Stonestreet, but it's a pretty big reworking....and those things that are going FROM Stonestreet (and Crabb's Branch, in the case of the bus depot) need to go TO someplace.....and the burden of those has been dumped on MCPS rather than working with them to find alternate locations/circumstances.

      Delete
    3. Mayor Newton mentions the trailers being used for storage of old desks and textbooks in her statement. It's not clear if she is also targeting the property across the street from the trailers.

      Delete
  3. Beer tastes on a champagne budget.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Trailers for storage... Trailers for students... Maybe the next superintendent's office can be in a trailer. After all, like Starr, MCPS superintendents have to keep their interests mobile.

    ReplyDelete

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