The Silver Spring Penguin

The MoCo planning board has spent the last few years cooking up designs for new headquarters on Georgia Avenue, but the owners of downtown’s City Place shopping center have another idea: Move that joint into the mall.

In a Jun 11 letter to planning board chair Royce Hanson, developer Walt Petrie pitched the idea of housing the planning department inside the mall’s future nine-story office tower, which will sit above the shopping center on Colesville Road and Fenton Street. That rings up to 210,000 square feet of leg room for the department, the letter stated.

As a bonus, auditoriums within the former AMC movie theater on the mall’s fifth floor can be used for large public meetings, Petrie wrote.

The proposal comes at a time when the planning department is equally hard up for space and cash. Valerie Berton, a spokesperson for the department, told The Penguin that plans to replace the department’s old digs on Georgia Avenue at Spring Street with new digs at the same site are on hold. Pin that on “budget challenges and the county council’s request,” she wrote in an email. (more…)