Two staff members of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission filed minority reports dissenting from the recommendations of the Site Selection Advisory Committee for B-CC middle school No. 2.
Brooke Farquhar, supervisor for park and trail planning with the Montgomery County Parks Department, writes, in part: "Costs were not thoroughly evaluated in the process and misinformation may have prejudiced the votes of committee members. ... The process lacked a robust analysis. The potential sites should have been analyzed more thoroughly, based on detailed information that would allow consistent comparison across the sites."
Frederick V. Boyd, community planner with the county planning board, writes, in part: "[T]he rating process used for selecting sites did not provide a real opportunity to consider the community character and quality of life consequences of choosing a candidate site. Six of the eight criteria considered specific physical qualities of a site — its location, size, topography, access, availability of utilities and physical condition — in isolation from its neighborhood and from broader issues of recreation and environmental stewardship. The remaining two — availability and cost — are equally aimed at specific properties. Indeed, their descriptions appear to have been written to enable easier consideration of some public sites; cost is defined as 'The cost to acquire a site is considered, compared to sites that may be in public ownership.' This implies that there are fewer acquisition or other costs associated with public ownership than with private sites."
Tom
8:27 am on Friday, March 16, 2012
I have no problem with school personnel, within reason, determining how a school should be built, but the failure of school personnel, for the second time, to conduct an intellectually honest and defensible site selection demonstrates that this process should be led by Park and Planning, the organization that actually is responsible for planning communities. We can only hope that these two Reports mark the beginning of the aggressive advocacy needed by Park and Planning to defend our scarce parkland.
David
1:15 pm on Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Wow, Tom. That's a pretty self-serving comment isn't it? You neglect to mention that part of that parkland that is left used to be a school, and that is why the school put in a reclaim clause. Intellectual honesty is defintiely in short supply... I agree with you there.
Tom
2:23 pm on Tuesday, March 20, 2012
David – Did you really intend to make this comment? You can see that I wrote in reaction to the two minority reports and the concerns they raised, not about the site specifics.
I have written multiple posts about the nature of the site and the fact that it is not the same site it was when a school was located there. Indeed, within the last week, I specifically noted how, after the closing of the junior high, over 1/3 of the land, along with a separate access road, was transferred to HOC for the construction of an elder care facility, and how the site is now a dual-use site, too small for the middle school.
I respect that you may have a different view on the placement of a school at this site. It is my hope that we can disagree without taking cheap shots at each other.-Tom