In Rockville, pro-affordable housing and anti-development slates battle for the City Council

While most Maryland elections take place in even years along with DC and federal elections, some municipalities hold their elections in off years, including the City of Rockville in Montgomery County. The nominally nonpartisan election essentially features, as in past years, two factions with diametrically opposing views on new housing for this 67,000-person city.

Greater Greater Washington endorses Virginia Onley for mayor and Mark Pierzchala, James Hedrick, David Myles, and Cynthia Cotte Griffiths for the other seats on the five-member City Council. All are running together as the “Team Rockville” slate.

Two competing views for Rockville give rise to two slates

The City of Rockville has been evolving from a typical american suburb of single family houses, large surface parking lots, and strip malls into a more walkable urban place. As elsewhere in our region, new thinking on design — walkability, multimodal transportation, small-business centric economic development, and mixed-use development — have been on the rise.

While places like Bethesda and Silver Spring are not incorporated cities or towns of their own, Rockville is, and it controls its own zoning separate from Montgomery County. This gives the city an important role in addressing the housing shortage in the region. It also means that the pace for housing development has become a flashpoint in municipal elections going back as far as 2009 or earlier.

Two candidates, current mayor Bridget Newton and councilmember Virginia Onley, are competing for the post of mayor, which is most analogous to council chair. Thirteen candidates are running for the four other at-large seats on the city council, but most notably, four have allied with each of the mayoral candidates in a pair of slates, Rockville Forward and Team Rockville, each with competing visions for Rockville’s future.

Newton, the two-term incumbent mayor, leads the Rockville Forward slate consisting of councilmember Beryl Feinberg along with Monique Aston, Suzan Pitman, and Kuan Lee. Newton has generally opposed new housing as mayor, and setting the tone for Rockville Forward, she told the Twinbrook Community Association, “The number one challenge facing our City is managing growth.”

For the Team Rockville slate, Onley said she believes that housing affordability should be the key priority in Rockville. Joining her on the slate are current councilmember Mark Pierzchala and potential newcomers James Hedrick, David Myles, and Cynthia Cotte Griffiths. All of the candidates acknowledge the need for future housing growth and the importance of Vision Zero policies to eliminate deaths and serious injuries on the roads.

Rockville’s divisions date back a decade or more

Back in 2008, Rockville’s City Council was debating a proposed Montgomery Housing Partnership development with a large amount of affordable housing, called Beall’s Grant II. After a contentious hearing in which people argued, among other things, that lower-income housing would bring crime and overcrowd the schools (which weren’t true), the City Council took actions to block the plan.

The following year, voters replaced a pro-Beall’s Grant II mayor with one from the opposition campaign, and also elected to the council the then-head of a civic association that had opposed the project: Bridget Newton.

Pierzchala, who’s now part of the Team Rockville slate, also joined the council that year. Griffiths, also of Team Rockville, worked on the first Beall’s Grant as a staff member at MHP and wrote about Beall’s Grant II for a blog she helped operate at that time, Rockville Central.

One public policy issue in the Beall’s Grant II fight was a regulation that limits development if it might put schools over capacity. Currently, a development moratorium will be imposed if schools exceed 120% capacity. Studies have shown, both in Montgomery County and in Massachusetts, that such moratoriums are a poor way to manage school crowding as the majority of new students come from turnover in existing housing, not new development.

One can make a moral argument as well: using the tools of government to exclude children from affluent, high-opportunity neighborhoods such as Rockville, prevents them from accessing higher-quality schools and also means the demand for housing and education will pop up elsewhere.

Virginia Onley believes that “we have not been able to balance the … infrastructure guideline with our school capacity and our severe housing shortage,” and proposes that Rockville “lift some of the development limits around our Metro Districts and in Town Center to help with this balance.” Bridget Newton does not support a change.

Rockville should move ahead with Team Rockville

The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments says the region must add 75,000 more housing units than are currently planned by 2030, and that every jurisdiction in the region must increase the pace of creating housing, particularly municipalities with Metro stations. Rockville cannot afford to have leadership that will not help the city do its share, and the “Rockville Forward” slate is misleadingly named as it wants to keep Rockville in the past.

Citing in part the incumbent’s track record against new housing near Metro, the Action Committee for Transit has endorsed the Team Rockville slate. ACT notes that on transportation, Pierzchala was a leader in opposing I-270 widening while Newton repeatedly supported bad highway plans — including a new Outer Beltway bridge between Gaithersburg and Dulles — while sitting on the region’s Transportation Planning Board.

Team Rockville will work to foster growth around our metro corridors, oppose plans to widen I-270, and promote housing affordability within Rockville. Virginia Onley, James Hedrick, Mark Pierzchala, Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, and David Myles will bring an urbanist future for Rockville and we urge City of Rockville residents to vote for them on November 5.

This is the official endorsement of Greater Greater Washington. All endorsements are decided by our volunteer Elections Committee with input from our staff, board, and other volunteer committees. Thanks also to Rockville resident and volunteer Michael Dutka for much of the writing and reporting on this article, with help from Edmund Morris and Alan Zibel. Dutka made prior campaign contributions to candidates mentioned here, but is not a member of the Elections Committee and did not vote on the endorsement decision..