Silver Spring Transit Center on Council’s Nov. 19 Agenda

The Montgomery County Council is scheduled to receive updates on the delayed Silver Spring Transit Center and on the status of the Affordable Care Act on Nov. 19 The Council also is scheduled to take action on the Long Branch Section Plan and to hold its second worksession on the Countywide Transit Corridors Functional Master Plan. The main purpose of that plan is to establish the routes and possible station locations of the proposed countywide Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.

The Council’s weekly session will begin at 10 a.m. in the Third Floor Hearing Room of the Council Office Building at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville. The morning and afternoon sessions and a public hearing on Expedited Bill 29-13  starting at 1:30 p.m., will be televised live by County Cable Montgomery (CCM—Cable Channel 6 on Comcast and RCN, Channel 30 on Verizon). The broadcast also will be streamed through the County Web site at www.montgomerycountymd.gov. It will be repeated starting at 9 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22.

At approximately 11:30 a.m., the County’s Department of General Services will update the Council on how the problems identified during construction of the Silver Spring Transit Center will be remediated. According to a Nov. 5 progress report, all remediation work except application of a Latex Modified Concrete overlay will be completed this winter. The overlay will be applied after winter weather breaks and completion of the transit center is being targeted for May.

At approximately 10:30 a.m., Department of Health and Human Services Director Uma Ahluwalia will brief the Council on how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is progressing statewide and in Montgomery County. She will discuss eligibility for enrollment and the impacts of the ACA.

At 11 a.m., the Council is expected to take action on the Long Branch Sector Plan that will lead to revitalization of the community in Silver Spring. The Council’s decision during the process to eliminate the proposed second stage of the plan and not rezone most of the large residential apartment complexes led to significant changes in the draft plan originally presented by the County Planning Board.

During the morning session, the Council is scheduled to take action on Bill 11-13 that will require the County’s Executive Branch to develop a plan to implement a Commercial Property Assessed Energy Program.

Bill 11-13, whose chief sponsor is Councilmember Roger Berliner, would establish a commercial property assessed clean energy (PACE) program to assist qualifying commercial property owners to make energy improvements and establish a revolving loan fund to provide property owners loans under the program.

At 2:30 p.m., the full Council will continue its review of the proposed Bus Rapid Transit plan. BRT is a plan for specially designed buses to travel over mostly dedicated lines throughout the County.

The Council’s Transportation, Infrastructure, Energy and Environment Committee, which is chaired by Berliner and includes Councilmembers Nancy Floreen and Hans Riemer, completed its series of worksessions on the Countywide Transit Corridors Functional Master Plan on Nov. 5. The committee made recommendations for each of the 10 proposed BRT corridors in the Planning Board’s recommendations.

The Council received the Planning Board’s draft of the Countywide Transit Corridors Functional Master Plan this summer. That draft primarily recommends a network of Bus Rapid Transit lines covering about 81 miles and 101 stations, not including the already master-planned Corridor Cities Transitway.

For each corridor, the recommendations are for the route, the station locations and, for each segment, the minimum right-of-way. The recommendations also state whether there would be dedicated lanes or not, and whether there would be up to 0, 1 or 2 lanes added in the road’s cross-section dedicated to BRT.

The public hearing on Expedited Bill 29-13 would change the hiring preference for a veteran, a veteran with a disability and a person with a disability from priority consideration to a numeric point system. It also would establish a hiring preference for a widow, widower or spouse of certain veterans.

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