Great work session this evening on the Gaithersburg APFO (Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance). The direction given to staff was:
– Instead of putting a school’s district into moratorium, institute a school construction fee that would help MCPS with its school funding. The fee is proposed to be identical to the County’s fee (not currently collected inside Gaithersburg).
– The moratorium limit would be raised to 150% of MCPS capacity. There is some discussion over whether that number is too high or even if there should be a moratorium number — according to one of our Planning Board members, the state’s guidelines for APFOs do not allow them to trigger automatic moratoriums.
– There may be some cases where the capacity constraint would be waived. This list is under ongoing discussion.
Ryan Spiegel and I ran some numbers during the session, and at about $5000 per housing unit (a rough average for town homes and apartments), the Kentlands Blvd. master plan would generate $11.5 million, going a long way toward covering the cost of an elementary school. The developers we spoke with have no issue with the fee as long as they can be sure they won’t run into a moratorium after making plans.
The bottom line is, making new development possible seems to be the key trigger for MCPS to add capacity in its Capital Improvement Plans, so we’re moving in a positive direction with this new thinking on the APFO. And, adding a source of new funding to partially offset the capital cost should also help.
The record remains open on this discussion until September 11, and discussions are ongoing including the Planning Commission meeting on September 2 and the Mayor & Council meeting on September 21.
The packet from this evening’s meeting is available at the link below, and the video is here: http://video2.siretech.net/…/Mayor%20and%20Ci…/2355/2355.mp4