President Steve Silverman
Montgomery County Council
100 Maryland Avenue
Rockville, MD 20850
RE: Olney Master Plan and the 32-Acre Site on Bowie Mill Road
Dear Mr. Silverman,
I debated several ways to convey my thoughts to you and
the Council regarding proposals for the 32-acre site on Bowie Mill Road. I
decided to be brutally honest.
I have lived in Montgomery County all of my life. About
a year ago, I moved to Olney after seriously considering getting out of the
County completely. I decided to buy a house on Kilt Terrace not far from
the Bowie Mill site because it had a semi-rural look and feel to it.
Originally, I purchased my first house in the Wheaton
Woods/Aspen Hill section of the County in 1992. At that point in time, I
moved to where I could afford to move. No the houses were not big, the lots
were small and my neighborhood was a mix of white and blue-collar workers.
However, there was a sense of community and it was a pleasant place to live.
Over the course of 12-years I believe County policies
which included a push for affordable housing caused my former neighborhood
to decline by increasing the population, crime and traffic. Also, the Aspen
Hill Swimming Pool which had served the community for forty years closed at
the end of the summer for good.
Why did the pool close? Well it depends on who you talk
to. However two things are clear. One is that a neighborhood of mostly
single-family homes with many of the households having enough disposable
income to join the pool became a neighborhood with many multi-family or
multi-resident households that could not afford to join the pool. The other
factor was the County injecting several million dollars into the Wheaton
Glenmont Pool creating a water park facility that we could not compete
with.
In closing, I have seen what County policies did to one
neighborhood and I do not want to see it happen in Olney. Enough is
enough. The roads are already overstressed with traffic and you want to add
more? Yeah sure let's increase the population even further in Olney and
expect a different result. Crime will go down and traffic will become
manageable Sorry, I'm not smoking any of that stuff.
Sincerely,
David Frampton
18508 Kilt Terrace
Olney, Md 20832