Is Montgomery Parks' desperate quest for an award driving its illegal Little Falls Parkway actions in Bethesda?

The latest twist in the Little Falls Parkway road diet scandal in Bethesda is the Montgomery Parks department's apparent desperation to win an award from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration (AAPRA). You may recall that the last major turn in the controversy was an FY-2024 budget resolution introduced by Montgomery County Councilmember Andrew Friedson (D - District 1) that forbid Montgomery Parks from constructing any permanent linear park using the two closed lanes of the parkway blocked off by the road diet. It was passed by the Council, but critically, the resolution's language did not require Montgomery Parks to remove the temporary road diet currently in place. As I correctly predicted at the time, Montgomery Parks has indeed left the road diet in place, and has no intention of removing it.

Montgomery Parks indicated it was rabidly motivated to bring back a revised linear park plan for approval from the Council at that May meeting. Among the speculation as to what is driving Montgomery Parks' fervor for a project overwhelmingly opposed by the surrounding community - ideology? helping a developer with future plans to redevelop the Washington Episcopal School and Bethesda Pool sites? securing a right-of-way for the future extension of the Purple Line to Westbard? - we can now add one more. The Little Falls Parkway Neighborhood Coalition has just sent a letter to Friedson alerting him to Montgomery Parks' desperate award quest, and its alleged falsification of its application materials for the award.

According to the coalition's letter to Friedson, Montgomery Parks and the Maryland National-Capital Planning Commission applied for the AAPRA award on March 3, 2023. This application was filed several weeks before a public hearing on the proposal to make the road diet permanent, and use the closed half of the parkway as a linear park. At this time, Montgomery Parks was attempting to win an award for a project it (supposedly) had no idea would even be approved by the public and Planning Board. The coalition questions whether the parallel quest for the award occurring through the March 30 public hearing and April 27 Planning Board vote to approve the permanent road diet/linear park proposal means the public process was actually just "a sham."

You'll recall that Planning Board staff quickly recommended approval of the road diet/park less than 24 hours after the March 30 public hearing, meaning that it made its recommendation without reviewing all of the submitted written and audiovisual materials from the evening before.

"In hindsight, the lack of transparency surrounding the Planning Board process now makes sense," the coalition writes in its letter to Friedson. "Everything was seemingly fixed to promote Parks view and to give Parks a chance for an award."

Montgomery Parks wasn't just lying to the public about the road diet plan, it turns out. It was also lying to the AAPRA in its application for the award. Not only was it seeking an award for a project that had not been approved and did not yet exist, but it was lying to either the public and/or the AAPRA about the number of visitors to the linear park that did not yet exist.

In its application for the award, Montgomery Parks wrote that because of its road diet and programming of "recreational opportunities" in the closed lanes, "50,146 walkers/bikers visited Little Falls Parkway in 2022." The coalition notes that when it filed a public information request regarding the number of pedestrians and cyclists who utilized the closed lanes, Montgomery Parks told them it did not have that statistic. Yet on March 3, it magically did have that number to include in its AAPRA award application. "Is this data authentic or was it illegally withheld from Montgomery County residents? It is either one or the other," the coalition writes in the letter to Friedson.

More lies? Montgomery Parks told the AAPRA that the Kenwood and Town of Somerset neighborhoods that surround the parkway segment in question have "a lot of multi-family housing." Not quite. The area is overwhelmingly dominated by single-family homes. 

Even after the approval of the Friedson resolution to block the construction of the linear park until a future approval by the Council, Montgomery Parks submitted more material to the AAPRA on May 25, 2024, and did not disclose that its linear park had been temporarily blocked 17 days earlier.

The coalition says it has notified the AAPRA of Montgomery Parks' falsifications on its award application materials. Montgomery Parks is currently a National Gold Medal Finalist for the award, the coalition has learned. "Montgomery Parks is not interested in winning the hearts and minds of the residents of Montgomery County, but only an award from an organization based in Washington state," the coalition writes. 

"The reason we are contacting you and the other Councilmembers now is to emphasize that Parks is acting contrary to Council oversight. The timeline here shows that Parks was determined to push through its reconfiguration of Little Falls Parkway even if it was unsafe so that it could be eligible to win a national award in 2023. Parks submitted its application with the above description of Little Falls Parkway to AAPRA on March 3. At the time, this issue had not even come before the Planning Board. Yet, Parks was confident enough to include the Little Falls Parkway project in its application. We are left with the uncomfortable thought that the process before the Planning Board was a sham. In hindsight, the lack of transparency surrounding the Planning Board process now makes sense. Everything was seemingly fixed to promote Parks view and to give Parks a chance for an award. 

"We are concerned that Parks will continue to pursue its Little Falls Parkway reconfiguration to justify an award even if it comes at the expense of public safety. At this point, with the motivations of Parks in question, the safest option would be for Little Falls Parkway to go back to the configuration that existed immediately prior to this vanity project. 

"The configuration for Little Falls Parkway we are suggesting is as follows: Two lanes of traffic with a median at least 15 feet wide between Hillandale and Arlington Roads and four lanes of traffic with the existing wide median between Hillandale Road and Dorset Avenue. 

"Of course, Parks can always propose an alternative, but this new revelation has shredded any legitimacy attached to the Planning Board’s approval of the current configuration of Little Falls Parkway. Until then, the configuration of Little Falls Parkway should not be left in limbo. We ask that the Council continue to exercise proper oversight of Parks and the Planning Board and require them to restore Little Falls Parkway to our suggested configuration, which was in place without any problems before Parks caught gold medal-fever.

"Finally, we wanted to update you on our efforts to partner with other stakeholders on Little Falls Parkway. After the Council vote, there were individual efforts to reach out to Parks to find common ground, but Parks declined our offers without explanation. We can only conclude that Parks would like to continue to force citizens to live with the current configuration of Little Falls Parkway for as long as possible so that the public becomes demoralized and loses interest."

To summarize, we now have yet another lawbreaking or unethical action in the trail of illegalities that have led to the Little Falls Parkway road diet. The road diet was implemented without any public process in 2017. It was constructed with money illegally taken from a trail maintenance fund. No appropriation of funds for a road diet was ever made by the County Council. And the road diet was implemented without the required approval of the National Capital Planning Commission, as mandated under federal law.