The Gaithersburg City Council and the city’s Planning Commission will hold a joint public hearing next month on a sketch plan to develop the former Leidos site, where Amazon hopes to build a distribution center.
The City Council and Planning Commission will consider the sketch plan at a public meeting on June 15, which will be conducted virtually. The city posted a legal notice about the meeting on its website on May 21.
Frederick-based Matan Companies bought the campus at 700 N. Frederick Ave. in early 2019. The initial goal was to have the property be a mixed-use space with commercial and retail space, according to an email to the city from the company’s managing partner, Mark Matan.
Amazon later approached Matan with the idea of building a $92 million distribution center that would create up to 850 jobs.
Amazon has not publicly acknowledged its proposal for the Gaithersburg property, but a site plan and overview has multiple references to a project there for Amazon, as well as the company’s logo.
John Schlichting, Gaithersburg’s director of planning and code administration, told Bethesda Beat earlier this month that Matan initially submitted a sketch plan for the site in May 2019, and the mayor and council approved it in August.
He said that one of the criteria was that the schematic development plan had to include multiple buildings and multiple uses, because that’s what the sketch plan said.
“When Matan filed their schematic development plan for the last mile distribution facility, it was a single use in a single building. So we made the determination that the SDP that they filed was not in conformance with the sketch plan, because of that criteria that it needed to include multiple buildings and multiple uses,” Schlichting previously told Bethesda Beat.
Matan has since filed a new sketch plan, Schlichting said.
If the sketch plan is approved, it would move forward to the schematic development plan phase.
Matan wrote in an email to the city on April 27 that Amazon — which he referred to as “PS,” short for “Project Summit – Amazon,” has said the “schedule/solution is not satisfactory.” Matan’s letter says that having to get a revised sketch plan approved could lead to a delay in the delivery date and “create substantial issues for PS.”
Matan also wrote in the email that the city should consider running the “sketch plan revision and site plan” simultaneously, which he said was done for a Carmax site.
Dan Schere can be reached at daniel.schere@moco360.media
