As the dust began to settle on the debate that yielded plans to rebuild Bells Mill Elementary School, Duncan MacKeever sat in a public meeting, unsure if he should speak up.
“I wasn’t going to get up and scream and yell in front of a room full of Bells Mill parents and teachers,” said MacKeever.
Now he wishes he had.
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) on Monday, Feb. 26 approved the preliminary site plans for the new facility, said Dick Hawes, director of Facilities Management. Hawes said that the approval means that for all intents and purposes the plans are beyond the point of reconsideration.
Those plans, said MacKeever, call for a building that will hurt the value of his home by positioning one corner of the school thirty feet from his property line.
The close proximity of the proposed building has concerned MacKeever and three other neighbors enough to retain attorney Larry Shulman, MacKeever said.
“We don’t want to sue,” MacKeever said, “[but] this building could result in a significant and reflective loss of real estate value.”
Callum Murray, the Potomac Team Leader for the Montgomery County Planning Board’s staff, said that in fact it might not be too late to revise the new Bells Mill. Submission of preliminary plans for the project are imminent now that the matter has been approved by the School Board, Murray said, but the staff and the Planning Board will take into account the concerns of the public as part of their review of the plan before they pass their recommendations for the project back to MCPS.
PREVIOUS PLANS to close Seven Locks Elementary School and build a new school at a site on Kendale Road met with intense opposition over the last several years. Ultimately, the Board of Education decided to renovate Seven Locks in 2011, perform minor upgrades to Seven Locks in the summer of 2007, and to build a brand-new Bells Mill in time for the 2009-2010 school year.
MacKeever had reservations about the specific plan for Bells Mill when that decision was made, and his fears have grown in the months that have since passed.
Members of the Bells Mill community worked with MCPS officials beginning in 2003 to come up with a design for a new Bells Mill, but those plans were scrapped last year without any chance for public comment, said MacKeever. They were replaced by the plans for the new school that had been designed for the Kendale site.
MacKeever has met with Hawes, James Song, director of construction, and other construction officials from Montgomery County schools over the last several months. Those meetings have not alleviated his concerns, MacKeever said. Rather, MacKeever said he left those meetings with the impression that in the wake of last year’s drama, and with a groundbreaking scheduled for January 2008, the design and approval process was being fast-tracked.
A builder by trade, MacKeever conducted his own study of the plans and found that by repositioning some of the playing fields and the buildings to different parts of the property, that the issue could be resolved.
Hawes said that MacKeever’s alternative site layouts produced various problems that made them impractical. One suggestion would have created traffic problems and another would have located the main office away from the school’s primary entrance, something that MCPS prefers not to do, Hawes said. With the preliminary plans approved by the Board of Education, it is too late now for MCPS to revise those plans, Hawes said.
“The net goal is to get them to open up the thought process to reposition the school,” MacKeever said.
MURRAY SAID that he has received at least two e-mails recently from neighbors near Bells Mill expressing concern over the preliminary plans.
The staff will review the project and then pass recommendations along to the Planning Board for consideration at which time a public hearing will be held, said Murray. MacKeever and others who have concerns about the project could testify at that hearing.
Once that hearing takes place the Planning Board will pass its recommendations on to the Board of Education, and while the board is not bound to follow those recommendations they almost always do, said Murray. No date for the hearing before the Planning Board has been set.
MacKeever also has brought his concerns to the Montgomery County Office of the Inspector General.
No decision has been made yet whether to explore MacKeever’s concerns, said Inspector General Thomas Dagley. Such a decision could not be made until the Bells Mill project is an itemized expense on the Montgomery County’s Capital Improvement Plan, which it was not in 2007, Dagley said. Montgomery County will release its 2008 CIP on March 15, Dagley said, and Bells Mill could be included in it.
“Then we’ll actually be able to look at some concrete figures and information,” said Dagley.
Once something is an itemized expense in the county’s budget the Inspector General’s office can audit it, and Dagley said that complaints from the public such as MacKeever’s play a part in the decision process of choosing what to audit.
MacKeever said that he and his fellow neighbors aren’t opposed to the new school, but that they want their concerns to be addressed.
“We want the school,” MacKeever said. “It’s not that we don’t want it. … The point is [MCPS officials] aren’t open to consider our problems."