East Bethesda residents are protesting a County Council committee’s decision earlier this month to designate a building height cap of 200 feet for the Wisconsin Avenue site of the Chevy Chase Acura dealership.
A county legislative analyst who is helping the council review the Bethesda Downtown Sector Plan had recommended placing a 145-foot height limit on construction at the property at the intersection with Cheltenham Drive. However, council member Hans Riemer made the case for the higher height cap because Chevy Chase Acura sits across the street from the future Marriott International headquarters, which could surge 290 feet into the sky.
“It seemed like a building at 200 feet there might not really have much additional impact,” Riemer said Friday in a phone interview.
Homeowners on surrounding streets think otherwise.
“We already feel that we are very hemmed-in by this development. We do feel that although Mr. Riemer said there is no incremental impact of another 200-foot building, we object to that, because there certainly would be,” resident Terry Long said. “We don’t need more canyonizing of this whole area.”
John Bowis, Chevy Chase Acura’s president, said he has no immediate plan to redevelop his roughly 0.2-acre property and is committed to keeping his family’s business on the site it has occupied for 78 years.
“I’m simply protecting the future value of the property,” he said. “We have every intention to stay in downtown Bethesda and to stay an automobile dealer.”
He said he’s sympathetic to residents who object to tall height caps on Wisconsin Avenue properties to the north, where there is no buffer between commercial buildings and homes along Tilbury Street. But a transition area, including apartments and a public parking garage, stands between his dealership and neighborhood streets, he noted.
Bowis contends that his property should be considered part of Bethesda’s urban core, pointing to a county legislative staff document stating that building heights should be kept lower north of Cheltenham Drive. His dealership lies just to the south.
Riemer said that since the March 2 meeting he has visited the area around the dealership property and is open to reconsidering his stance on the height limit. His committee in general had reduced height caps from those in the Montgomery County Planning Board’s version of the downtown plan, which recommended allowing buildings of up to 250 feet at the dealership site. So Riemer said he’d thought the East Bethesda residents would be pleased by the council committee’s overall approach.
“However, that doesn’t seem to reflect their views. Their view tends to be that even the heights recommended by council staff were more than they were seeking,” Riemer said. “We have to continue working with East Bethesda and come up with something that brings more comfort to the community.”
East Bethesda resident Amanda Farber said community members were less than thrilled about the council’s cutbacks because they believed the planning board’s proposed heights also were way out of line and based on misconceptions about their neighborhood.
“The narrative that the council is ‘lowering’ the heights comes from the fact that the planning board and staff raised them too high to begin with for many properties,” she said. “The recommended heights remain inconsistent and incompatible in several locations.”
In addition to frustration about the Acura site, the residents also are concerned about the Avondale Street area. On the advice of legislative staff, the council did reduce the maximum heights to 45 feet on one side of the road, but members went with a 70-foot cap on the other. Farber said residents wanted buildings on both sides of Avondale Street to have a 45-foot maximum.
Farber said she and other residents will continue urging council members to walk through their neighborhood for a better understanding of the impact that tall buildings could have.
Bowis said he’ll also keep lobbying officials for flexibility in how he is allowed to develop his property. He said he isn’t asking for more density and simply wants more freedom over how to use the square footage already allotted to his site. A building with a tower component tends to be more architecturally pleasing than a short, squat structure of exactly the same square footage, he said..
Though the final version of the plan could enable commercial property owners to acquire more density from other owners, Bowis said he’s primarily interested in making the most of the square footage his property currently has.
“I have no interest in building a huge, large building across the entire parcel,” he said. “I’m just trying to build a great building, and it might not even happen in the next 20 years.”
