By Adam Pagnucco.
The raging fight over the future of Wootton High School has several dimensions: political, community-based, financial and even racial. One dimension is more technical than any of these and has ramifications going far beyond Wootton: how to assess the impact of new development on enrollment. There is a range of opinions on this but let’s pick two prominent ones – those belonging to Superintendent Thomas Taylor and Rockville City Council Member Adam Van Grack.
We will start with Van Grack. He is among the loudest opponents of Taylor’s recommendation to relocate Wootton to the Crown site in Gaithersburg. This site has run opinions from Van Grack on this subject on December 17, December 26 and March 5, collectively generating thousands of page views. (Thanks, council member!) Among his points opposing the move are that MCPS is allegedly failing to consider the City of Rockville’s development plans near Wootton. He claims that such new development would generate substantially more enrollment at the school, making it an unwise decision to close it. His opinion is shared by the Maryland Building Industry Association.
Taylor addressed this argument in a March 3 presentation to the school board. While he claimed that MCPS includes housing pipeline data from the county and the two MoCo cities with land use authority (Gaithersburg and Rockville) in determining enrollment projections, the district only counts projects with approved preliminary and/or site plans. Van Grack would like MCPS to include at least a portion of development in master plans too.
Who’s right? Riding on that question are substantial swings in calculations, projected enrollment and – eventually – capital spending and school boundaries.
Let’s start with master plans. In and of themselves, these plans do not approve development. As Taylor says, they are “of a visionary nature, looking many years ahead.” They essentially reflect what a local government would like to see in a community over the next couple decades. While they contain recommendations for zoning changes (which are often passed separately) and infrastructure plans, they do not actually mandate that any of that happens.
If any county master plan has been fully built out in recent years, I’m not aware of it. In fact, old master plans are replaced by new master plans long before development reaches planned capacity. The principal reasons are that 1. Development takes a long time and 2. Planning authorities adopt different visions for local areas as decades pass. Taylor jumps on this point by noting the failure of development at the White Flint mall site, which remains a dusty crater more than 15 years after a master plan called for filling it with thousands of housing units.
So Taylor is absolutely right that master plans do not equal actual development. Van Grack partially concedes this point, writing, “While I completely understand that planned and pre-site-plan approved development should not hold the same weight for enrollment estimation as approved site plans, to complete exclude such information in the modeling, without any consideration at all, is concerning and contrary to MCPS’s own Capital Improvements Program monitoring directive.”
Now let’s get to preliminary plans and site plans. The county planning department offers these definitions for those steps in the development process.
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Preliminary Plans show how a property or set of properties will be subdivided or resubdivided, based on the regulations found in Chapter 50 of the Montgomery County Code. At the time of Preliminary Plan, an Adequate Public Facilities finding is made to determine whether the existing transportation and school networks can handle the intensity and types of uses proposed.
A Site Plan is a detailed plan, required only in certain zones, that shows proposed development on a site in relation to immediately adjacent areas. It indicates roads, walks, parking areas, buildings, landscaping, open space, recreation facilities, lighting, etc. Site Plan review is required of all floating zones and of most overlay zones. It is also required in some zones when using optional method of development provisions. Further, certain parking facilities that fall under the provision of the off-street parking section of the Zoning Ordinance are also subject to Site Plan review.
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The existence of an approved preliminary plan or site plan indicates that the land in question has an owner who is exploring the potential for development. The owner is interested enough to hire land use attorneys (who are not cheap!), complete an application to the relevant land use authority and perhaps engage with community stakeholders. There may be additional costs for public relations, professional vendors and maybe even lobbyists. This is much more than a master plan vision and Taylor believes projects receiving such approvals should be counted in determining enrollment projections.
But here’s the crazy part that not even Taylor discusses: projects with these approvals don’t always get built.
Last October, the county’s planning department released a study titled Montgomery County Residential Development Pipeline Analysis. The department “conducted the Development Pipeline Analysis to better understand why many approved housing projects remain unbuilt and how the county can improve both housing delivery and the way the Pipeline is presented to the public.” Among the study’s findings were:
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The Pipeline in its current form is often misunderstood. It records projects with early-stage Planning Board approvals, not guaranteed or imminent construction, which explains why projects often remain in the Pipeline for years even if progress is occurring.
Many projects hold approvals for more units than they realistically intend to build, meaning unit counts in the Pipeline often overstate what will be delivered. Preliminary Plans, or initial Planning approvals, test for the maximum densities achievable on a site, but may never be fully realized, which is why some units are never constructed.
Developers reported compounding barriers to delivering housing: high interest rates, rising construction costs, county policies, lengthy regulatory and permitting processes, and infrastructure requirements.
The most frequently cited impediments to project completion were financial infeasibility, construction cost increases, and local policy constraints—particularly rent stabilization.
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The county planning department’s development tracker makes this very clear. It currently shows 215 approved projects with roughly 15,000 unbuilt units and 5.8 million square feet of commercial space. More than 2,000 of these units were approved more than a decade ago.
This is a lot of approved and unbuilt units.
Stories of such projects abound in the press. One of the more notorious ones is the 390-unit 9801 Georgia Avenue, which is adjacent to the Forest Glen Metro station and received planning board approval in March 2024. Nevertheless, the developer quickly backed out. At this writing, the development’s site plan remains approved.
One important fact to note is that land with approved plans is more valuable than land that has not gone through the entitlement process. This means that owners with little intention to develop have an incentive to get approvals and then later sell to a developer for more money. This is a well-known phenomenon in the real estate industry, and while it’s great for brokers, it’s not so great for actual construction.
So accounting for all of the projects that are approved but unbuilt, Taylor’s standard may be a little generous. I suppose MCPS could get wait for projects to get building permits before counting them for enrollment, but that would give the district little time to adjust capacity given the many years that MCPS capital projects take to get built.
See how messy this is?
Now here is where I give Van Grack some credit. MoCo developers cite rent control as the primary disincentive to develop rental projects and Van Grack rightly points out that the City of Rockville never adopted rent control. Perhaps Rockville’s projects will be less likely to languish in development limbo than the county’s.
One final factor is a fiscal one. Suppose we have a loose standard for counting development towards enrollment. If we do, we risk building capacity we don’t need. On the other hand, if the standard is too strict, we risk someday returning to overcrowded schools. Again, this is messy.
I think there are other rationales for keeping Wootton High School open and Van Grack has made a lot of those points. Count me as agnostic on the question of this particular school.
But on the issue of counting development towards enrollment, I don’t find Taylor’s stance to be unreasonable. We can quibble over the exact standard, but let’s agree on this: just because a governmental entity imagines a project, that doesn’t automatically mean it will happen. Let’s make reasonably sure that new housing will exist before deciding to spend tens of millions of dollars on new classrooms to service it.