{"id":807,"date":"2017-08-01T08:45:53","date_gmt":"2017-08-01T13:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/?p=807"},"modified":"2017-08-01T08:45:53","modified_gmt":"2017-08-01T13:45:53","slug":"new-update-on-johnson-property-annexation-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/?p=807","title":{"rendered":"New Update on Johnson property annexation issue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We appreciate Steve Lawrence for providing the following update:<\/p>\n<p>Last evening&#8217;s (July 26) meeting with CalAtlantic was interesting. They are the builder who wants to put homes on the Johnson property (the annexation we are contesting).\u00a0 Listed below are the highlights:<\/p>\n<p>CalAtlantic had tables lined up with big pictures of the proposed development and had various people at each discussing different aspects of their plan.\u00a0 Besides CalAtlantic, there were people from the City as well as the engineering firm that did a lot of the previous engineering planning.\u00a0 Johnson&#8217;s lawyer was in attendance &#8211; however, Russell Johnson was not.<\/p>\n<p>The Plan was only slightly different than\u00a0what has been presented in the past.\u00a0 Their main goal was to communicate to the local community\u00a0with the desire of keeping us informed and looking for feedback. This is not to be &#8220;nice&#8221; but to tell the city &#8220;we spoke with the neighbors&#8221;\u009d because next week they will present this plan to the City of Gaithersburg for approval.<\/p>\n<p>The plan is now for a total of 106 homes.\u00a0 Models are available to view in &#8220;Brickyard&#8221; (Beltsville) and &#8220;Norbeck Crossing&#8221;\u009d (Silver Spring).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>26 Single Family Homes asking $700,000,\u00a0excluding any upgrade costs,\u00a0with 5,000 square feet lots, offering various upgrades, options and amenities. That square footage (5k) is equivalent to one tenth of an acre. In practical terms this means only 10 feet between homes. You can practically pass a jar of mustard with your neighbor with your windows open. The single family homes don&#8217;t really have usable yards.<\/li>\n<li>80 Townhomes.\u00a0 64 of them will be sold at &#8220;market rate&#8221;\u009d with 16 of them sold to lower income households.\n<ul>\n<li>64 are Market Rate Townhomes with options and various sizes. Three to four stories. 20-foot-wide homes are asking $550k and the end units will be wider at 24 foot and asking over $600k base price.<\/li>\n<li>8 MPDU&#8217;s Townhouses which is the County lower income homes.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.montgomerycountymd.gov\/DHCA\/housing\/singlefamily\/mpdu\/programsales.html\">http:\/\/www.montgomerycountymd.gov\/DHCA\/housing\/singlefamily\/mpdu\/programsales.html<\/a><\/li>\n<li>8 Workforce Townhouses which is another further level of affordability.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.montgomerycountymd.gov\/DHCA\/housing\/singlefamily\/workforce\/\">http:\/\/www.montgomerycountymd.gov\/DHCA\/housing\/singlefamily\/workforce\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>No Condos and no apartments during this first round of building &#8211; they have no plans for developing the Safeway area yet.\u00a0 There will be a new entrance basically where the small Johnson building is today, which will only allow east bound entrance and west bound exit.\u00a0 Thus more potential\u00a0U turns at Rifleford Road.\u00a0 There will be a connection to Nursery Lane in the rear of the development as well as to the north side of the Safeway. Total of 3 entrances: 1) Rt. 28, 2) Safeway\/gas station, 3) Nursery Lane.<\/li>\n<li>They believe all the children in the community will go to Thurgood Marshall ES, Ridgeview MS, and Quince Orchard HS.\u00a0 Lots of concern expressed with back and forth discussion in this area. They claim the community would add 30 (thirty) children to Thurgood Marshall Elementary School. They say that&#8217;s within the 150% overcrowding allotment and so don&#8217;t intend to infuse any money to enlarge Thurgood Marshall because they don&#8217;t have to.<\/li>\n<li>One person in the audience who attends PTA meetings (Shannon Cisco sp?) said that Brown\u00a0Station elementary has been enlarged and upgraded which will offset the impact\u00a0of the students that were relocated during the Brown Station construction.\u00a0 This needs to be investigated further. Shannon claimed that 30% of the kids currently at Thurgood Marshall come from Brown Station homes.\u00a0 Funniest thing added was&#8230;&#8221;Last thing we want is another Rachel Carson catastrophe.&#8221;\u009d\u00a0 Really? Sounds like we&#8217;re about to get one.<\/li>\n<li>The roads will be 20 feet wide. That&#8217;s pretty tight. Used to be roads were 36 feet wide in older communities. Some roads will have an extra eight feet of width for visitor parking (parallel\u00a0parking). There will be 76\u00a0parallel\u00a0parking locations.\u00a0 All visitor parking will be on the street and not in front of Townhomes.<\/li>\n<li>These houses will have natural gas.<\/li>\n<li>These houses will have gravity fed drainage, so no grinder pumps will be required.<\/li>\n<li>They will have their own HOA community but in theory the one acre &#8220;tot lot&#8221;\u009d\u00a0they are building is open to everyone.<\/li>\n<li>They will build a row of trees to\u00a0separate\u00a0their community from Willow Ridge.\u00a0 It will be approximately 10 feet wide\u00a0separating\u00a0your backyards from theirs.<\/li>\n<li>Rob Robinson\u009d\u00a0(City of Gaithersburg employee) will be the main lead on this project within the City. He was at this meeting and spoke for about 3 minutes.\u00a0He is the person that presented the Johnson plan to the City back late last year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When asked initially about the Annexation CalAtlantic said that it was approved and they assume it will go forward.\u00a0 When asked about the legal litigation and dispute, they quickly recognized this issue and said that all current efforts are plans and anything performed is at their risk.\u00a0 Since they don&#8217;t plan on breaking ground until next summer (2018) at the earliest, their risks are very low. They plan to start sloping the ground in July 2018 and in April 2019 start building homes.<\/p>\n<p>Construction traffic will use the Route 28 entrance mainly.\u00a0 Once they start the development, it could continue to 2020 or 2021, depending how fast they sell.<\/p>\n<p>Robert Wu, City Council member,\u00a0showed up to support the community.\u00a0 We tried to talk him into running for our district!<\/p>\n<p>BTW, 30 plus people attended from all the local communities to listen and participate in our lively discussion.\u00a0 A bit light but numerous people had conflicts.<\/p>\n<p>I am sure we missed some details and advise all to review the information available from CalAtlantic.\u00a0 We will keep you apprised of future related developments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We appreciate Steve Lawrence for providing the following update: Last evening&#8217;s (July 26) meeting with CalAtlantic was interesting. They are the builder who wants to put homes on the Johnson property (the annexation we are contesting).\u00a0 Listed below are the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/?p=807\">Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":782,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northpotomacnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}