Your Turn

Have you been following our recent development discussions? Would you like to know more about redevelopment, density, parking, traffic, or creating a more walkable Laurel? Do you have an opinion about the future of Laurel?

The City of Laurel Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the City’s proposed 2007 Master Plan in the Council Chambers of the Laurel Municipal Center next Tuesday, August 14th at 7:00 p.m.

It's your turn to speak out. Serious policy wonks will want to prepare by reading the entire 200+ page Master Plan here in Adobe Acrobat format.

I also want to draw your attention to Laurel2020's interesting article about a more walkable Laurel here.

What do you want? In 2020, Route 1 through Laurel should look like: a) Bethesda, b) Silver Spring, c) Mayberry, or d) the way it is today? Please share your opinions in the comments section.

Full disclosure: I served on the committee that produced the 2007 plan.

Laurel 2015: Urban or Suburban

The following article is also available in our enhanced Laurel Connections Podcast format. My thanks to Karen Lubieniecki , Marlene Frazier, Councilman Mike Leszcz, Jim McCeney, and Michael Dyer for participating in our podcast.

There was a meeting tonight at city hall to discuss a new development called Hawthorne Place. Please see the Leader’s excellent coverage of Hawthorne Place here.

update: Please also see Keith's take on the meeting at the Laurel2020 blog here.

Tonight’s meeting was typical in many ways. About twenty people attended. The group included bedrock members of the Laurel community. They listened as developers described their dream for Hawthorne Place. The community listened carefully and asked polite questions.

But in many ways I think the tonight’s meeting was far from typical. I think we will remember tonight as an important moment in the history of Laurel.

I say this because I think Hawthorne Place represents the first step towards a new Laurel. The profound question our community must answer is as follows:

In 2015 will Laurel’s commercial core be primarily suburban or urban?

Today Laurel is a suburban town with a suburban feel. We have Main Street and a commercial core along Route 1. Route 1 has a handful of commercial strip shopping centers, a mall undergoing massive revitalization, big box retail stores, and a couple of car lots. Today Laurel is very much like thousands of other suburban towns across America.

Silver Spring, Bethesda, Rockville are examples of town centers with a more urban feel. They have more intense development, high rise buildings, and parking garages. While not Washington’s K Street, or Manhattan’s East side, Hawthorne Place has more in common with them than with say … Columbia or Bowie, or Laurel as it is today.

Hawthorne Place will bring about 2000 residents and 150 thousand square feet of office space and plant it all on 11 acres. It will obviously bring traffic, but also an awesome new tax base to fuel the city.

Most importantly, Hawthorne Place will cause similar development. You can bet that if Hawthorne Place is approved as explained tonight, the market will drive Laurel to a more urban development pattern in the future.

The questions at tonight's meeting reflected these concerns. People asked the developers about the density stemming from 20 and 16 story apartment buildings.

While people seemed to focus on traffic and building height, I think the real debate is about coming to a community agreement on a vision for Laurel’s future. Will Laurel remain suburban or should we become more urban?

This is an important moment in Laurel’s history. We must continue this conversation. However, I suggest we focus our conversation on the fundamental question of wanting a suburban or urban feel in Laurel's commercial core. Building heights, density, or traffic at Hawthorne Place are all leading indicators of a more profound decision. I suggest we look past these specific decisions about the Hawthorne Place project to focus more broadly on Laurel’s future.

Please share your comments about Hawthorne Place and the future here.

Click here to hear voices from tonight’s meeting. I’m also looking for feedback on the podcast format. Please let me know if you find it useful. -rick

Dream Job - Connections Podcast

Imagine you grew up a baseball fan. Not just a mild root, root, root, for the home team kind of fan, but a stats loving, history of baseball touting fan.

Now imagine that you’ve gone off to college and one day you decide to apply for a summer internship. To make this fantasy even better, imagine you’ve applied for an internship at the Baseball Hall of Fame during the same summer that Cal Ripken is going to be inducted into that same Hall of Fame.

Laurel’s own Andy Hoglund is that fan and he has that dream job. I called Andy Hoglund to ask him how things were going in Cooperstown this week.

Click here to hear the interview. Then click on the 128kbps Stream option for the best quality. I apologize that the sound quality of the phone connection is a little noisy. I spoke to Andy over his cell phone.


(Induction Day 2007, Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York, Photo by Andrew Hoglund)

Community Building in New Orleans -Guest Commentary

Thanks to everyone who emailed about last week's Washington Post story on local bloggers. This week Laurel Connections is pleased to offer our blog space to Ms. Mary Wilson.

Rebuilding A City: Growing A Community

By Mary Wilson (New Orleans, June 2007)

Everything moves slower in New Orleans. People, conversation, metabolism—even the water trickles lazily down the gutter guards into the street. People saunter down streets swaying to some distant sound of music. A rail-thin man with legs like stilts, wearing a porkpie hat is on his way to nowhere special. A woman is walking a dog on a leash made from an old neck-tie. You can see the faint dark shadow of a tattoo on her left buttock through her cream linen dress.

I was born and raised in Laurel, and I suffered from small-town claustrophobia for a long time. So, I selected a college in New York City to live anonymously and unattached. But about a week ago, I went to New Orleans on a service trip with a group of 10 other Fordham University students.

New Orleans knocked the cocky independence right out of me, and ended my love affair with New York’s indifference. By the end of the week, my service team had forged the strongest sense of community I’ve ever known. The more it developed, the more it stood in stark contrast to our surroundings. As we worked with various hurricane relief efforts throughout the city, we saw what it looks like when communities are abandoned.

I’ll never forget riding into New Orleans for the first time. Seeing house after abandoned house spray-painted with “TFW”—shorthand for Toxic Flood Water. The huge “X” marked on every door in the most damaged neighborhoods, the bottom cavity of the cross reserved for a number to note how many dead bodies had been found inside. I met people whose homes were seized by the government because 30 days after the storm they were still in Texas or Georgia and hadn’t come back to claim their house. I passed countless schools, churches, storefronts that had been boarded up since August 2005.

The most dramatic devastation was due to Katrina, but the more insidious damage is because of the absence of community. It disappeared with the people, deserted by a government that cared only to ensure the safety of the city’s money-making attractions. One government official is quoted saying the storm did what the city never could: clear out the poorest parts of the city. The fear now is that the city will rebuild: right on top of the longstanding communities that need help coming home and getting back on their feet.

Seeing New Orleans reminded me of what I’ve always known to be true: that government must serve the community. And yet, by the end of the week, it was not the depressing state of the local government that stuck with me, but the hope I found in the local community.

Laurel is blessed with a strong community and an impressive city government that serves it at every opportunity. I have always taken it for granted. I finally see how important it is. We must cherish the community we have in Laurel and serve it when we can. We must continuously renew it to make it better.

We all have a stake in our local place--our community. But only if we stake our claim together do we stand a chance against the next storm that comes our way.

The author with her Global Outreach Team in New Orleans, (seated) Natasha Kayulu, Frank Rupp, Danielle Gasbarro, (standing) Sabina Antal, Mary Wilson, Jodey Ruthen, Sarah Cascone, Georgia Doremus, Ian Hayes, Fergus Scully, Brendan Sculley. Click photo to enlarge.

A New Laurel Tradition Is Born

(click picture to enlarge)

What do you get when you mix the following ingredients?

• 40 children on bicycles
• A few hundred yards of colored ribbons
• Hundreds of balloons
• Half a mile of tape
• Lots of glue
• 6 Laurel Police officers, half of them on super cool police bikes
• 40 pounds of ice cream
• A warm summer evening

You get a brand new Laurel tradition!

Laurel City Council member Gayle Snyder organized the first ever Laurel bike decorating contest, bike parade and ice cream social tonight. It was a great success and surely a brand new tradition for Laurel.

The kids decorated their bikes at the Laurel Armory and then paraded with a full police escort down the 400 block of Montgomery Street. Adults had a chance to catch up with friends and neighbors. Everyone had a great time enjoying Haagen Dazs chocolate ice cream bars.

Kudos to Councilwoman Gayle Snyder and her team of helpers for a wonderful idea, beautifully executed. (I believe Mr. Fred Snyder deserves special thanks for collecting goodies all day.) Laurel Police Officers did a fantastic job keeping the parade route safe. Council Member Mike Leszcz, State Senator Jim Rosapepe and Mayor Craig Moe also took time out of hectic schedules to join in the fun. Joanne Wilson had the unenviable job of judging the bike decorating contest. But everyone was a winner tonight as a new Laurel tradition was born. Be sure to join Gayle next year on the first Friday in June for this annual event.