A neighborhood association in Chevy Chase says it’s “appalled” at proposed zoning that could allow a six-floor apartment building backing up to a street of single-family homes.
Naomi Spinrad, vice president of the Chevy Chase West Neighborhood Association, wrote an email earlier this week to members of the Planning Board and County Council in which she criticized rezoning recommendations for the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Bradley Boulevard.
The site is home to the Bethesda Fire Department’s Station No. 6.
The Bethesda Fire Department, a nonprofit distinct from the county government-operated fire and rescue service, has examined allowing a developer to build a six-floor, roughly 180-unit apartment building that could have ground-floor retail.
County planners recommended changing the site from residential zoning to mixed-use “commercial-residential” zoning with a 70-foot height limit.
“The imposition of [commercial-residential] zones on properties beyond a half mile from a transit center, confronting/abutting our single-family neighborhood and Norwood Park, is development creep,” Spinrad wrote. “It moves the so-called edge out of the demarcated sector plan area and into communities that, according to the zoning code, are supposed to be protected.”
Officials from the Bethesda Fire Department have not decided to proceed with a redevelopment project on the site. The leaders of the group say an apartment project could help finance a new fire station elsewhere on the site to replace the aging station there today.
Other options the Fire Department is considering include no changes to the existing station, a major renovation or building a new standalone fire station on the same property.
Planners made the zoning change recommendation in the Staff Draft of the Bethesda Downtown Plan, the master plan that will set zoning, land-use policies and transportation priorities for the next 20 years in downtown Bethesda.
The five-member Planning Board, which is expected to hold a public hearing on the Staff Draft on June 24, will likely make changes to the plan before approval. The County Council will then consider making its own changes before final approval.
In the Staff Draft, planners wrote that the mixed-use zone pitched for the fire station property “would be an appropriate zone to replace the fire station and redevelop the site to include medium density residential housing.”
Spinrad asked the Planning Board to remove the area from the Bethesda Downtown Plan altogether, citing the section of Wisconsin Avenue between downtown Bethesda and Friendship Heights that is made up of a golf course and single-family home neighborhoods.
“This is a direct threat to those homeowners and their emotional, familial, and financial investments, and to our unincorporated community,” Spinrad wrote. “No arm of the Montgomery County government prior to this has proposed commercial development between Bradley Boulevard and Somerset Terrace.”
In a community meeting with concerned Chevy Chase West residents last September, Bethesda Fire Department leaders stressed that conceptual designs of the development being presented to planners were preliminary and nothing had been decided.
The Fire Department owns the station property. The Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service provides the personnel that work in the station.
