ThayerAvenue.com

This is a letter indicating that Marci Stickle and George French will assume the official role of nominators from the Silver Spring Historical Society (replacing Jerry McCoy) for “Determination whether to prepare Public Hearing Draft Amendment” concerning the historic designation of First Baptist Church at Wayne & Fenton.

If you can’t read it, don’t worry. You can find links to all the documents on the Planning Board web site for the 23 June 2011 agenda under Item 6. Yeah, you heard that right. Beating a (mostly) dead horse. Among those documents, you’ll find a letter from the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission (315K PDF) outlining their 6-2 ruling against the church being added to the Locational Atlas and Index of Historic Sites or included in the Master Plan for Historic Preservation. You’ll also find a staff memo from the Historic Preservation Office (2.4MB PDF) of the Montgomery County Planning Department (M-NCPPC) attempting to rebut all the claims from the Historic Preservation Commission.

This is now going beyond simple historic preservation. It’s not a developer looking to just tear something down to make money. Sure, a developer will make some cash in the long run, but this is about letting these people have the church they need when the facilities they have are crumbling around them. But there’s something else here. If the Silver Spring Historical Society (with other preservation organizations supporting them) loses this battle, they’ll become more marginalized than they ever were, almost to the point of irrelevance. I’d be fighting, too, if I were them. But don’t forget that Dr. McIntosh and the rest of the congregation NEED a new church, and this isn’t helping matters.

At any rate, there it is. Thursday, June 23, 2011 – one week from today. Do with it what you will. And please, for the love of all that is good and holy, someone tell these people that unless they’re using an old Smith Corona (or a monospaced font), they can stop double-spacing between sentences on all these documents.

The people who have been sending out the letters about the “big box” stores might have been unmasked. Well, at least another outlet for their useless, no-credit campaign has.

Back on December 7, 2009 (a day that will live in infamy?), the first blog post was posted at this “MoCo Smart Growth” blog. Since then, there have been seven posts, all railing against the same Germantown zoning issue. I believe these are the culprits. Now, the next question: Who are these people?

A new theory has come to the forefront: Anti-development activists are teaming up with labor unions (or leading them) in Germantown and other places to keep the non-union grocery store out. Potentially, the UFCW. This is a huge organization with, presumably, lots of proper political power behind it. Could an organization like this really drive such an awful campaign that’s started to get some real flak from others in the community? Even progressive, pro-union people? It appears so. Or at least some rural Maryland faction of it could. I consider myself progressive and pro-union, but this is just plain stupid if they’re involved.

I’d like to know if anything of substance actually happened at the March 16th hearing. From what I understand, the efforts were too little too late. I’ll be trying to confirm who’s behind all this and send updates as I have them. If anyone out there knows anything, please drop me a line or comment here. It appears the people behind this are too scared to actually show themselves.

UPDATE: I found their Twitter account. Wow. These guys are socially savvy with no common sense. And their tweets indicate a halfhearted attempt at whatever they’re trying to achieve – kinda like the rest of their efforts.