The Silver Spring Penguin

ROCKVILLE — A handful of county council members said they leaned toward constructing a footbridge between Silver Spring’s new library and the nearby Wayne Avenue parking garage.

“We do want pedestrian travel, but we have a disabled caveat that drives the conversation a different way,” council member Roger Berliner (D-District 1) told his colleagues on the human services committee Thursday. “We need a pedestrian bridge on Wayne Avenue to satisfy our obligation to the disabled.”

However, the committee’s members — Berliner, Duchy Trachtenberg (D-At large), and chairperson George Leventhal (D-At large) — couldn’t carve their collective opinion in granite because one related issue was still up in the air: downtown Silver Spring’s urban-renewal plan. The game plan, which recommends an urban design for parts of the hood, says no sky bridges allowed.

“The urban-renewal plan was implemented to guide an urban-renewal project,” Diane Schwartz Jones, assistant chief administrative officer for MoCo exec Ike Leggett, testified before the committee. That meant the Downtown Silver Spring shopping center, not the new library on Fenton Street and Wayne Avenue, she indicated.

People with the county’s planning department previously said otherwise, and legislative analysts with the county council agreed that the urban-renewal plan covered more than the Ellsworth Drive area. Also, some East Silver Spring residents look at the new library as a gateway to the Fenton Village area, which could use a little urban renewal of its own, they said.

Instead, Leventhal asked legislative aides to dig into the prospect of tweaking the urban-renewal plan. An amendment to the plan would add a little time to the library project, but it would also give residents an opportunity to offer more opinion, he said.

A bunch of neighborhood organizations have already thrown in their two cents on the bridge itself, Leventhal explained to his colleagues. Groups affiliated with the library, as well as Silver Spring’s urban-district advisory committee, supported the bridge as an access point for disabled patrons.

However, the planning department gave the bridge a thumbs down. The walkway, which would hang about three stories above Wayne Avenue near Fenton Street, flipped the script on contemporary urban design, several planners said previously.

Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board was split down the middle and could offer no opinion, according to Leventhal. At its monthly meeting on Feb 9, the advisory board held a lengthy discussion and even held a formal vote on whether an informal vote on the bridge should be taken.

Ultimately, 10 of the advisory board’s 15 members voted (informally) against the bridge; three members supported it; two were absent. But because no unanimous consensus could be reached, chairperson Darien Unger said he would not offer county council members any formal opinion from the board.

Leventhal said he would soon introduce a proposal to trim the number of advisory boards and committees throughout the county. Downtown Silver Spring has a couple of formal boards: the citizens advisory board and its three committees; the urban-district advisory committee; an arts and entertainment district advisory committee; and the transportation-management district advisory committee.

Photo of George Leventhal at a previous event courtesy of the council member.

ROCKVILLE — Members of the county council’s human services committee said Thursday that they would recommend a design that plants Silver Spring’s new library on Wayne Avenue (below), with parking across the street.

However, they weren’t ready to give a thumbs up to a proposed pedestrian bridge between the library and the Wayne Avenue parking garage. That structure might contradict Silver Spring’s urban-renewal plan and could be replaced with a street-level crosswalk, they said.

The committee’s partial stamp of approval for this design falls in line (sort of) with MoCo exec Ike Leggett’s recommendation. In Leggett’s scenario, a five-story, 63,000 square-foot library would sit on the corner of Wayne Avenue and Fenton Street, with the pedestrian bridge linking the library with upper levels of the garage. An accompanying 10-story residential project would sit on Fenton and Bonifant Streets.

Council member Valerie Ervin (D-District 5) admitted there was no consensus among residents over library designs. Still, she said she was willing to move forward with Leggett’s idea if the pedestrian bridge could be examined further.

The problem with the bridge is this: A 1999 game plan for Silver Spring’s urban renewal does not mention an elevated pedestrian bridge between the Wayne Avenue garage and a building across the street. Furthermore, reps from the planning board and Leggett’s office weren’t sure if the bridge would be in the urban renewal zone.

“The master plan is a guide, not a mandate,” Diane Schwartz Jones, assistant chief administrative officer for Leggett, told the committee. “We don’t have to follow it if a pedestrian bridge makes sense.”

Ervin also felt the $684,000 bridge could be replaced by a street-level, mid-block crosswalk. But David Dise, chief of the general-services department, argued that residents didn’t feel safe crossing that street. And one woman repping the Friends of the Silver Spring Library said the bridge was a deal breaker for her organization.

“Putting people on the street will deprive them of library services,” she told the committee. “For handicapped people, for mothers with small children … without that bridge, this design couldn’t be endorsed.”

To settle the issue, committee chair George Leventhal (D-At large) recommended public meetings on the pedestrian bridge alone. The council will reconsider the matter after the December recess, he said.

Leggett’s design beat out another that would have set the library on Fenton and Bonifant Streets, and the residential building next to The Crescent condominium on Wayne Avenue. Reps from the planning board told council members Thursday they favored a variation on this theme that reduced the apartment building’s height. This design would have been consistent with Fenton Village’s “shorter profile”.

But Leventhal dismissed the planning board’s recommendation because it meant fewer residential units in the apartment building. Some portion of those units must be priced for the MPDU and workforce housing programs.

Updated: The pedestrian bridge might go against Silver Spring’s urban-renewal plan, not its sector plan as previously posted. Thanks to Glenn Kreger, planning department, for clearing that up. — JD (Dec 5, 2008).