Business & Tech

Science City Taking Shape in Shady Grove

But what shape that will be remains uncertain, has critics concerned.

More than five months after winning county approval, the controversial "Science City" in Shady Grove is taking its first steps toward fruition.

An advisory panel of business and biotech leaders, civic activists and government officials held its first meeting Monday night, and will dive into the plan's details next month.

The results of an environmental assessment of a proposed 14-mile transit line that will be Science City's backbone are expected this week.

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Preliminary plans for a 4.5 million square-foot research and academic campus on the 107-acre Belward Farm will be made public by the end of the year.

The Great Seneca Science Corridor Master Plan – formerly known as Gaithersburg West – lays out a 30- and 40-year blueprint for more than doubling the amount of research, office and retail space on 800 acres around the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center. The development would, at full build-out, double the workforce capacity of the state's largest biotech hub to more than 52,000 jobs.

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The notion of a so-called "Science City" sparked more than two years of intense and, at times, acrimonious community debate, culminating in May with the County Council's decision to adopt a scaled-back plan. Science City supporters wanted more than 20 million square feet of commercial space. The council set the threshold at 17.5 million.

The area in and around the Life Sciences Center is home to nearly 7 million square feet of research and office space. More than 3 million square feet of space was previously approved and are in the construction pipeline.

The master plan says that commercial space cannot exceed 11.1 million square feet until Maryland secures funding for the first half of the Corridor Cities Transitway. Planners envision the CCT as a $532 million rapid bus line or $999 million light rail that would carry up to 30,000 weekday riders along a 14-mile corridor between the Shady Grove Metro station and the COMSAT site near Clarksburg.

The Maryland Transit Administration is mulling whether to have the CCT stop at a planned site adjacent Science City or to swing it south and add three stops throughout the heart of the research village.

The results of a federal environmental assessment are expected this week, allowing state leaders to announce the CCT's alignment in the next few months.

Development of the Belward Farm will claim most of the capacity available prior to the CCT's funding.

Johns Hopkins University, which owns Belward, wants to turn the 107 acres off Muddy Branch and Darnestown roads into a 4.5 million square-foot biotech research campus.

Preliminary plans will be made available for public input in November or December before beginning the county's approval process, said Elaine Amir, executive director of JHU's campus in Rockville.

In all, the Belward plan will take a year or more to finalize, she said.

Meanwhile, plans are going forward elsewhere in the area. Construction began this month on two seven-story office buildings that will consolidate the National Cancer Institute's headquarters across 575,000 square feet on the Johns Hopkins campus. It will take about three years to complete and will house the largest repository for cancer research in the world.

While not officially part of the master plan, Hopkins officials said the NCI complex, which will be home to about 2,100 researchers, is indicative of things to come — as long as all of the pieces are there.

The CCT and the master plan go hand-in-hand, said David M. McDonough, senior director of development oversight with Johns Hopkins Real Estate.

"The starting point for the master plan is mass transit," McDonough said. "It is essential to the vision."

As the vision continues to excite business and biotech leaders, Hopkins will endeavor not to change its critics' minds, Amir said, but to educate the community on the benefits of development.

"If we don't have Science City, we're going to have Budget-Deficit [and] No-Jobs Village,'" she said.

Much of the dialogue will fall on a 16-member, county-appointed advisory panel of property owners, civic activists and business and biotech leaders who will keep tabs on Science City's development, parse over traffic, transit and parking data, and identify opportunities to add community amenities.

The panel met for the first time Monday night for an organizational meeting that did not include substantive discussion.

Opponents remain skeptical about how much input the plan's critics will have, given their frustration with the master plan so far.

 "It's been three years that we've been saying 'What are you going to do?'" said Donna Baron, a panel member and organizer of the Gaithersburg-North Potomac-Rockville Coalition, which opposes the scope of the approved plan. "And we've been hearing a lot of rhetoric about a world-class science center but not what any of that means … There's still a lot of scary things to deal with in this master plan, and so far, we haven't heard anyone saying anything other than 'Deal with it, or move.'"

Sean Sedam contributed to this report.


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