The Silver Spring Penguin

Photo: Construction of Silver Spring's civic building and veterans plaza in progress. Photo courtesy of "Taken With an iPhone". Reprinted with permission.

Construction on downtown Silver Spring’s civic building is cooking on Fenton Street at Ellsworth Drive, but don’t expect the adjacent plaza to get a jump start on opening to the public.

The county won’t tweak its contract with construction crews to fast track the plaza’s development, Roylene Roberts, acting director of Silver Spring’s regional center, told the hood’s citizens advisory board last month.

The building and plaza are lumped as one project under this contract and are on the same schedule to score “substantial completion” by May 2010, Don Scheuerman, with the county’s department of general services, explained to Silver Spring’s urban-district advisory committee. That deadline has 30 days of wiggle room, he added.

But “our contractor is a little behind, and they’re working on a recovery schedule to get us back on that May 2010 deadline,” Scheuerman said in July. Expect the building and plaza to open to the public next summer, he said. (Acting regional director Roberts pegged their opening to July 2010.)

County reps previously said the plaza’s development along Fenton Street couldn’t be fast tracked because it was being used as a staging area for construction gear. Earlier this year, dump trucks and heavy equipment rolled over that space, removing then replacing the “bad soil” that created construction delays.

Still, members of the urban-district advisory committee were itching to get that plaza opened ASAP.

“That space is sorely missed,” Ernest Bland, an East Silver Spring resident and member of the urban-district advisory committee, said in June. “What we’d really like — businesses, residents — is to have that open space captured sooner rather than later.”

When construction wraps, Silver Spring will have a 42,000 square-foot civic building, plus a plaza decked with a veterans memorial and a seasonal ice rink.