NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

Montgomery County Planning Board,

Developer Meridian Destroyed

Bethesda Metro Center's

Popular Ice Skating Rink in

Back Room Deal Years Ago

Oops! While mega-developers and high-powered business interests clashed before Dr. Yes (Royce Hanson) and his Planning Board Thursday, an unfortunate detail came to light.


Many here in Bethesda wanted to know: why was the very popular ice rink at the Bethesda Metro Center suddenly eliminated?


Well, it turns out that the Montgomery County Planning Board (prior to Dr. Yes' tenure as chairman) made an old-fashioned, smoke-filled back room deal with developer Meridian: we'll let you demolish the skating rink that is so heavily used by the unwashed masses, and you'll tidy up the Metro Center plaza with "improvements."


This was recounted by opponents of Meridian's disastrous proposal for an aesthetically-repulsive, dumb-growth disaster of an office building, that would destroy the Metro Center plaza forever. Many of us were hearing this for the first time. What's more: Meridian never delivered on its "improvements" promise!! So we lost the ice rink, and we gained... nothing!


Now maybe we can start investigating the rest of the story: the cancellation of holidays in Bethesda, the downsizing of those that remain, and their wholescale (developer-engineered) movement away from the Metro Center to Bethesda Row. Bethesda was the original suburban Athens of the modern world. Now it is falling behind Rockville, Clarendon, and Silver Spring, and the demographics are trending toward stagnation. It shows what developer-controlled planning, and failed political leadership, can do. It's outrageous.

DEVELOPER FEDERAL REALTY

USES BLACKBERRY TO

CONCEAL TESTIMONY FROM

ROCKVILLE CITIZENS

A representative of Federal Realty "accidentally" used his Blackberry phone to disrupt the audio feed of his presentation to the Rockville Planning Commission Wednesday evening. After squelching his own presentation so that citizens watching on The Rockville Channel could not hear the details, he suddenly just knew that his Blackberry phone was the cause. How convenient!


Now, when the session is replayed on Channel 11, that portion of the testimony is now edited out entirely. Leaving Rockville citizens in the dark as to what Federal Realty is doing on this particular project proposal. Double convenient! Clever. Clever. You'll only read about this here on http://www.robertdyer.net/ not in the Post or Gazette, or on that "unofficial" Rockville blog.