Hopkins lobbyist circulating “push poll” survey on Gaithersburg West

Residents of the Gaithersburg and North Potomac areas recently received an email invitation to take a “survey” about the future of the I-270 corridor and The survey comes from Richard Parsons, who was hired by Johns Hopkins University to push for large-scale sprawling office parks on the former farm it owns west of Gaithersburg, far from existing transit and most of the people who need the jobs. Parsons is also being paid by the Gaithersburg-Germantown Chamber of Commerce to promote

promoting spending $4 billion on more lanes for I-270.

Here’s the survey. In case Parsons takes it down, here is a cached version.

Like many “push polls,” the survey is worded and structured to persuade people to support a particular point of view, not to collect information. It presents various pro-project talking points, then asks people if they agree, and presents choices between their good-sounding plan and some awful-sounding straw man non-plan.

At the start, the survey asks people if they support or oppose “creating good high-paying science, technology and related jobs in Montgomery County.” Of course, the survey never asks if people would prefer to locate those good, high-paying jobs around White Flint, at the Shady Grove Metro, in eastern Montgomery County, or one of the many other areas that would be better places for jobs. It also asks if respondents support “expanding mass-transit service, to reduce traffic congestion and provide alternatives to automobile travel.” It also asks if they support the CCT, “which would extend transit service from the Shady Grove Metro Station, through the Shady Grove Science Center, and north to Clarksburg using either light-rail or bus-rapid-transit.”

Few people actually oppose transit or new transit lines in the abstract. The debate in this area is not whether to build some transit, but what transit. A bus rapid transit CCT that follows the Planning Board’s suggested alignment, which is what Hopkins wants, takes a circuitous route that would draw few riders. Of course, Parsons didn’t ask whether people prefer a CCT that slowly winds through the office parks, or a more direct route. He didn’t ask if they prefer light rail or bus.

The most clearly slanted piece of the survey follows with this question:

If you had to decide how to develop the area around a future transit line, and your choices were:

(a) A higher-density community with more jobs, housing and retail all within walking distance, in a “transit-oriented” community setting, using the latest sustainable design standards, with more public recreation space, and greater economic benefits to the local tax base; or

(b) A lower-density suburban office park with a more traditional auto-dependent design, fewer traffic and school impacts, fewer jobs created, no new housing, retail, public transit, or recreation space, and less economic benefit to local taxpayers;

Which would you choose?

How about:

(c) A disconnected chain of small but dense office parks, with a slow, poorly-used bus connecting them, large freeway-style interchanges, large superblocks that make walking difficult, so-called parks that are actually just the medians of high-speed boulevards, and a vague but likely unfulfilled commitment by property owners to create some retail on the site, which costs local taxpayers billions to continually widen roads so that people from the rest of Montgomery County can drive long distances to the jobs that aren’t near their homes?

The survey concludes by asking people whether they agree or disagree with “the following statements in favor of expanding the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center as part of the Gaithersburg West Master Plan.” Each repeats a talking point from Hopkins about why the County should rezone this area far from transit for their benefit.

If you took this survey and replaced each mention of Gaithersburg West with White Flint, DC’s ballpark district, or Tysons Corner, it would be describing a truer choice. But that’s not where it is. Those other locations have Metro as well as good-quality bus transit. If this area were on top of one or more Metro stations, the development would make sense. But it’s not.

Hopkins and Parsons are trying to convince Montgomery County to build something in the wrong place. Hopkins has some land, and they want to develop on it as if it were atop Metro because they want to maximize their profit. That’s why they keep calling it walkable, transit-oriented development. At the same time, since they know it isn’t really that at all, the plan requires massive increases in auto capacity, and uses huge unwalkable superblocks.

Hopkins has a lot of money, and stands to make a lot more from this project. They can afford to pay lobbyists like Parsons to write slanted surveys that push their talking points. County Councilmembers have told me that there’s a lot of pressure to make Hopkins happy. The county’s taxpayers and commuters will be the ones paying the price.

Update: The Gaithersburg-Germantown Chamber of Commerce clarified that while they do support the 270 widening project, they are not paying Parsons or any other lobbyist regarding it. Our original source for this sentence got the information from someone else, who must have been mistaken. We apologize for the error.

Parsons is definitely being paid by Johns Hopkins, however, who confirmed to the WBJ that Parsons was acting on their behalf in creating and disseminating the survey.