Wheaton Town Square's Broken Promises

Community members were excited to learn that Park & Planning's headquarters is coming to the Wheaton Urban District - Montgomery County's third after Bethesda and Silver Spring - as part of the new Wheaton Town Center development project.  The excitement was quickly dampened, however, when civic leaders and small businesses realized that the project's design, developed by Department of Transportation, ignored years of public input and promises made to Wheaton communities by the County government.

The promise to create a viable Town Square was repeated throughout the public meetings and County fiscal documents: "The project provides for design, site improvements, and construction associated with a town square on Parking Lot 13 that is at least 1/3 the area of the site."

Yet the current DOT design calls for a 14,300 sq. ft. "community event plaza" that is smaller than many single-family lots - just imagine holding the Taste of Wheaton festival in your front yard - with two performance stages and a hundred exhibition booths!

To make matters worse, the "community event plaza" will be separated from the rest of the Park & Planning complex by Reedie Drive - a busy thoroughfare that connects Georgia Avenue & Viers Mill Road and routes Ride On & WMATA buses to the Wheaton Metro Transit Center.  DOT plans to either close or narrow Reedie, but that requires jamming all the bus routes into the intersection of Georgia Avenue & University Boulevard - an unrealistic and unworkable scheme backed up by a traffic study the DOT refuses to make public.

The proposed "community event plaza" also fails small businesses along the extant Lot 13 - instead of pleasant expectations of facing the new Town Square and reaping the benefits of increased foot traffic - they see a design that locates the "plaza" on the other side of Reedie without a single existing or proposed business facing it!  In fact, the only neighbors of this "plaza" will be the noisy & smelly metro bus bays and the equally noisy & smelly trash compactors and delivery doors on Reedie.

With funds for the project about to be allocated by the County Council, surely we can come up with a better design as, once the money changes hands, the community will lose any remaining leverage to influence the vision for a Town Center that will be the heart of Wheaton.