County Plans for Tech Park—Guest
Editorial by Robert D. Turner
Recent presentations by staff members of the Montgomery
County Government have described proposed plans for the
acquisition of real property and sale or lease of other real
property currently owned by the County, ostensibly for the
purpose of improving County operations and reducing
long-term costs. Little has been said, however, about the
financial risks to the County and other entities if these
plans are brought to fruition.
The proposed initiative involves the purchase of privately
owned property in the vicinity of Md. Route 28 (Darnestown
Road) , namely, the so-called GE Tech Park and the Finmarc
site
–
a total of approximately 88 acres of land that is currently
zoned for (light) industrial use. County property at the
Public Service Training Academy (off Key West Avenue), and
the County Services Park at Crabbs Branch Way, is to be sold
or leased. I have seen no fiscal data regarding these
transactions, but the following points have been expressed.
- The
portion of the 52-acre PSTA facility that would be sold
or leased is adjacent to the Shady Grove Life Sciences
Center, and would be a valuable addition to that tract
if and when the plans of Johns Hopkins University for
building a major medical research facility materialize.
-
Much of the the 92-acre Crabbs Branch property is
adjacent to a Metro station and deemed eminently
suitable for residential development.
- The
52-acre GE Tech Park contains a 340,000 square-foot
building that would be almost immediately useful for a
number of County functions (e.g., the Board of
Education, the Police headquarters and classrooms and
offices of the Public Safety Training Academy) that
could be relocated there.
- The
36-acre Finmarc property contains a warehouse building
with an area in excess of 200,000 square feet that could
be adapted for use as a warehouse by the County's
Department of Liquor Control, and the County-sponsored
study states that there is adequate area in the tract to
permit construction of a new food-preparation facility
for the Montgomery County Public School System. These
functions are currently located on the Crabbs Branch
site.
Financial Risks to Montgomery County
It must be recognized that implementation of these concepts
poses substantial financial risk to the County. The County
would have to expend substantial sums to acquire the GE Tech
Park and Finmarc properties, and additional outlays would be
needed to ready those sites for the functions that would be
relocated there. A total outlay in excess of $100 million
seems likely.
Only
then could the County begin to relocate the functions from
other locations, and only after that relocation had been at
least partially completed could the County begin to sell the
vacated lands. Additional outlays might be needed to raze
the property and make it suitable for sale to residential
developers.
In
today's unstable market for real estate, there is little
assurance that the proceeds from the sale of County property
would be immediately available or sufficient to offset the
prior expenditures for land acquisition and functional
relocation. In particular, there is likely to be a
considerable lapse of time before qualified developers
appear with sufficient fiscal resources and the desire to
acquire the County's land, and any sale to a developer who
proposes to leverage a purchase should probably be avoided.
Cost to the City of Gaithersburg
As far as I know, there has been no public discussion of the
implications of the proposed County purchase of the GE Tech
Park and Finmarc tracts on the City's tax base. Such an
analysis should take into account the contribution of the GE
Tech Park if and when it is rezoned from Industrial to MXD.
If this property were rezoned and developed (as has been
actively proposed), then it would add perhaps $50 million to
the City's tax base, If the Finmarc tract were similarly
rezoned, it could add another $25 million to the tax base.
These tracts could therefore represent a substantially
greater increment of the City's tax base than the County
would pay for them while they are zoned as Industrial
sites.
Conclusion
The foregoing discussion raises critical issues for both
Montgomery County and the City of Gaithersburg as to the
fiscal soundness of the acquisitions and relocations
proposed in the County-sponsored Property Use Study. No
decision to proceed with implementing the recommendations of
that study should be made until these fiscal issues have
been thoroughly investigated and the results of that
analysis have been made available for public comment.
Ancillary Issues
The preceding discussion does not even consider whether the
proposed plans actually represent worthwhile solutions to
the problems that are identified in the County-sponsored
study, and whether they would achieve long-term benefits to
the County. That constitutes a whole other subject for
thought and discussion. Certainly, key issues in this regard
are the proposed disintegration of the Public Safety
Training Academy and relocation, rather than renovation, of
the District 1 Police Headquarters.
Click here to respond to this editorial.
