By Adam Pagnucco.
In Part One, I summarized how I asked my sources to help me construct a list of important events in county history since the 1960s. Part Two listed honorable mentions. Part Three listed significant events (events 16-20). Part Four listed very important events (events 11-15). Part Five listed extremely important events (events 6-10). Today we list transformational events, which are our top five. Here they are in chronological order.
Completion of Capital Beltway (1964)
Source: The Beltway made it easier and more feasible for more county residents to work in Virginia and Prince George’s by creating an East-West highway in the Downcounty. It drew substantial numbers of regional and national travelers, including from I-270, that created continual congestion challenges for transportation planners and elected officials and affected county elections.
Source: Together with the abandonment of plans to extend I-95 through the District of Columbia and DC’s height limit, the Beltway shaped the development of DC and its inner suburbs – and their relationship to each other – by facilitating growth in the inner suburbs that might otherwise have gone to the District.
AP: If you have never been stuck on the Beltway, you probably don’t live or work in MoCo. This is one of a handful of physical features that define our geography, transportation network and economy and will outlive everyone reading this.
Wedges and Corridors General Plan (1964)
Source: The basis of the county’s land-use decisions for decades that created/resulted in a highly desirable (to many) single-use development (not placing residential and commercial uses together, for example), corridor cities, open space/“green lungs” and parks. Although planners now prefer mixed use and there are strong environmental arguments for it, much of the public still prefers the single-use development dominant in Wedges and Corridors.
Source: Still the basic growth plan for the county.
Source: The Wedges and Corridors plan laid the groundwork not just for the Ag Reserve and prevention of sprawl but also for the polycentric urbanism and transit-oriented development along the I-270 corridor and inside the Beltway. It also somehow managed to avoid mentioning the word “race” even though it was written in the same year as the March on Washington in the midst of the civil rights movement.
AP: This landmark plan is a big reason why the county looks the way it does today, with urban centers shrinking as they grow more distant from D.C. and linked by arteries like MD-355, Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road. You can read one of MoCo’s most important historic documents here.
Launch of charter government (1970)
Source: Dictates a lot of our county politics and policy today.
AP: The county’s charter, passed by voters in 1968 and first implemented in the 1970 election, established our current form of government. It created the office of county executive and separated the executive and legislative branches, with each possessing checks on the other. It makes us very different from jurisdictions in Virginia, which have local legislatures who appoint and oversee professional managers to run their governments. The consequence of establishing a county executive is that council members now compete to run for that office, a huge factor in county politics. I sometimes wonder how different our county government would be if that office and the resulting competition for it did not exist. Would policy play a bigger role in county decision making or would the same level of political competition play out anyway through a different mechanism?
First Metro station in MoCo (Silver Spring) opens (1978)
Source: Metrorail makes it easier/possible for residents, many of whom worked for the federal government or became federal workers, to commute to DC. It led to major development hubs around stations.
Source: Major economic strategy is entirely built around it.
AP: Look at most of the items on this final list – the Beltway, Wedges and Corridors, the Metro system and the last entry to follow – and you will see that my panel of historians is outlining the basics of the county’s geography and economy. Our county is the way it is because of these things. Metro is not just a transportation network – it’s also the foundation of our county’s development strategy. With Metro encountering seemingly endless budgetary and ridership challenges, do we need to diversify our development strategy in the future?
Creation of Agricultural Reserve (1980)
Source: Montgomery County would be dramatically different without the Agricultural Reserve. It limited an extraordinarily large area of the county to very low-density development, preserved opportunities for exceptionally scenic rural living, fostered farmers markets and farm-to-table options, maintained the cleanest air in the county, became a haven for cyclists across the region, and may yet become a mecca for solar energy production. The transferable development rights (TDRs), needed to avoid a “takings” lawsuit, increased density in receiving areas, particularly Downcounty.
Source: Its significance has a lot less to do with farming than with establishing a strong boundary that channels growth toward the I-270 corridor and the Downcounty crescent.
AP: MoCo’s masterpiece and the greatest legacy of legendary Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson. How lucky are we that our visionary predecessors established a place that embraces urban centers, suburban neighborhoods and agriculture all within the same borders? The Ag Reserve is one of the things that makes Montgomery County great. Long may it be preserved.