Politics & Government

Chamber Forum: Council Candidates Talk Green Building, the Economy and Choice Hotels

Eight candidates gave their takes on tax incentives and the city's future.

A proposed green building tax incentive, Rockville’s economic development and the deal to bring Choice Hotels to Town Center were among the topics discussed by candidates for Rockville City Council during a forum sponsored by the Rockville Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday at the .

It was the last of seven forums held this campaign season. Rockville voters will go to the polls between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

Eight candidates are running for City Council. (A ninth, Joseph Jordan, , though his name will appear on the ballot.)

Find out what's happening in Rockvillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Here's what the mayoral candidates said on a few of the issues covered by the forum:

Green building

Find out what's happening in Rockvillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The chamber has worked with city officials to craft to be considered by the next City Council.

Councilwoman Bridget Donnell Newton said she supports the incentive.

“Rockville prides itself on being a green city,” Newton said. “We also need to ensure that [as] we walk the walk that we’re talking the talk.”

The city should consider eliminating a car allowance for senior staff “so that we have more money to put toward good programs that support everybody,” she said.

Dion Trahan said he too supports the incentive and called for businesses to build green. “I want to up the ante,” he said. “How great would it be if Rockville had the premiere green building with all the bells and whistles that developers know a lot more than I do, but to really be a centerpiece?”

Councilman Mark Pierzchala said he supports the incentive “subject to availability of adequate funds.

“Also, when this comes before mayor and council, I want to see some solid arguments, some solid data that show that the amount of money Rockville can put into such a program is actually going to make a difference,” he said.

Virginia Onley said she supports the incentive. “I don’t have an answer as to how quickly we can get to being totally green, but there’s one thing that I want to do for sure and that’s move us forward—not take our time, not back-and-forth.

“I do believe that we can be a green city, but it’s going to take some time.”

Tom Moore said he supports the incentive, but has the same reservations about cost as Pierzchala.

“I think we’re at a moment where government support could really spur this on,” Moore said. “If we could get some economies of scale going, it’ll reach the point fairly quickly where we don’t need to have tax incentives to build these kinds of buildings, they’ll be economical all their own. But at this moment, I think it’s a good idea, it’s appropriate for government to step in and help push this.”

Richard Gottfried listed several state tax credits and programs aimed at creating green businesses. “I think we first need to look and see what our state has to offer and then let’s look to see what we have available, but not at the expense of our public tax dollars,” Gottfried said.

Les Francis said he opposes the tax incentives.

“I am totally opposed to taking hard-earned taxpayer dollars and gifting them to corporations,” he said.

As for the green building incentives, “most of these things backfire,” Francis said, citing the Obama administration’s $528 million loan to the now-bankrupt California solar energy company Solyndra Inc.

“Everybody pretty much knows that was a mistake,” Francis said. “When you gift money to a corporation that’s out of taxpayer’s pocket, I think that’s morally wrong.”

John Hall said he too wants to see the details of the proposed incentive. “But I think my history with regard to supporting green buildings and LEED certification awards is pretty clear,” he said. “We started that when I was on the City Council back at the beginning of the decade and it’s something that I thought was very helpful.”

In order to fund an incentive without overly burdening taxpayers, the city needs to “enlarge the field of participants” in its commercial tax base, Hall said. “And I think that if we make a real effort to do that then we will have more than made up the difference.”

Economic development

Candidates were asked what resources they would commit to advancing the discussion of the city’s economic future that began at last month’s .

City officials should look to forge a partnership with the county, state and federal government—similar to the partnership forged in the redevelopment of Rockville Town Center—in order to carry out a vision for Rockville’s future, Hall said.

That includes enlisting city staff, residents and business leaders “to make sure that the story didn’t end right then and there at the end of the summit, but that it continues on and that we take the next step,” Hall said. There is “logical linkage” to the vision for the city’s future and efforts such as , he said.

Francis said that the half-million dollars that the city spent on the draft plan for pike redevelopment “was a total waste of money.”

Some research shows the plan “will yield zero benefits to the City of Rockville in terms of income tax benefits, in terms of sales tax benefits,” Francis said. 

Furthermore, “it will draw away from the Town Center,” which is on its “third iteration" of redevelopment, Francis said.

Gottfried said the city should utilize the recommended task forces in order form a vision for the future.

“I think this is a great idea,” Gottfried said. “We need to call out for our volunteers to coordinate, to utilize our neighborhood resource program, to utilize our community development division, to coordinate all of these wonderful task forces to come up with—as Councilwoman Newton talked about—a vision for Rockville.”

Moore said the council should direct the city manager and city staff to assist the task forces and should monitor their progress.

“As individual council members, I think the thing we could do that would be most effective is just use the bully pulpit of our office,” Moore said. “Talk about it, get out there, get out in the community and make sure this issue remains visible with our communities.”

Onley said she wouldn’t commit resources at this time because “I would be making a promise that I maybe couldn’t keep."

Still, “We need partnership, we need to work together and we need to be on the same page,” she said.

Based on the city’s experience with “Imagine Rockville,” a community visioning process undertaken in the 1990s, people will volunteer for the effort launched by the summit, Onley said.

The goal of a follow-up summit proposed for next year is to hone the vision for the city’s economic future, Pierzchala said.

“I also want to advance the notion that there is already a vision out there that’s gone through massive public input and that’s our master plan and our zoning ordinance, which was just adopted a few years ago,” he said. “And that really does set a vision for how Rockville grows.”

Trahan told the assembled business owners that government should “get out of the way” and “listen to you.”

“The answer I really want to know is why are businesses leaving Maryland to go to Northern Virginia and how can we stop that hemorrhaging?” he said.

Trahan said he opposes and would “lobby relentlessly” against it.

“That will be a black hole that would suck the life out of the pike,” he said.

Newton said she would commit staff time and research and “support-type resources.”

“Until we know where we’re going it doesn’t make any sense to make a commitment to any money and what not,” she said.

The Town Center Action Team grew out of the Imagine Rockville process and worked to ensure that was located in Town Square, said Newton, who said she was appointed by County Executive Douglas M. Duncan to a committee to select the site for the library. Coupled with a in spring, the library provides an anchor for Town Center, she said.

The reason Newton said she mentioned that history “is because you have to know what you’re going towards before you get in the car and start going. And so we’ve got to figure out what we want to be as Rockville and then we all need to get on board and work towards that.”

Choice Hotels

Candidates were asked about whether the incentives offered to lure should be the “model the city should use” to attract businesses to Rockville.

“It’s a billion dollar company coming to Rockville and getting state and county incentives,” Newton said. “I wasn’t sure if you needed to be giving cash incentives.”

When General Electric moved to Rockville “they were given incentives such as memberships at the swimming pool or free golf,” Newton said. “There were things that we could’ve done as the City of Rockville that might not have used our cash.”

As part of the incentive package, the city sold 275 parking spaces in the Town Square garage to Choice for $30 a month for 10 years, instead of the $65 per space the city was originally seeking.

“Giving up those spaces in the long term will now effect Federal Realty,” which began a long-term lease of the garages in September, Newton said. “To go 10 years out and not have that income coming in was of concern to me.”

The closed session discussions of the deal should have remained confidential, said Newton, who has been critical of Councilman Piotr Gajewski, a candidate for mayor, for making details of the deal public.

“That’s a problem,” she said. “We wouldn’t even be talking about this Choice Hotel deal if the mayor and council’s closed executive session would not have been made public.”

Bringing Choice Hotels to Town Center is a good thing, Trahan said. “My problem is the process,” he said.

Specifically, Trahan took issue with a request by Choice Hotels to change the name of East Middle Lane to Choice Hotels Lane.

Even with the incentives, city officials took a name that was on the original city plat “and you put it on the auction block,” he said.

“If you’re going to go to that length, what else are you going to do behind closed doors?” Trahan said, adding that he supported transparency.

“But I do think government’s role is to make the environment conducive, not give freebies,” he said.

The incentive process “has to be behind closed doors,” Pierzchala said. “We are in competition with other jurisdictions in Maryland, Northern Virginia [and the] District of Columbia.”

Going public with details of a deal would allow competing jurisdictions “to undercut us,” he said. “This is all controlled by the state of Maryland laws on how you handle these incentive meetings.

“The whole thing is [when] you do an incentive we never go negative,” he said.

The Choice headquarters site “could’ve stayed a parking lot for 10 years, but now there’s a big expensive building going in. We will get additional tax revenue from this,” Pierzchala said.

Choice wasn’t “just going to plop down,” he said. “They were looking for somebody who was going to cooperate and sweeten the pot a little bit.”

Incentives aren’t always necessary and “the particular incentives will vary on the situation,” Pierzchala said.

“I believe Choice was a smart choice,” Onley said. Some of the company's employees are likely to move to Rockville and help the economy, she said.

“I do support it. I think it was a smart move to do and hopefully we’ll have more smart growth like that,” Onley said.

The public debate over Choice Hotels “has been poisoned by our country’s experience with sports stadiums” that take millions of public dollars and ultimately lose money, Moore said.

“This is not that,” he said.

The Choice deal turns a parking lot into an office building “that’s going to have hundreds of employees who are going to be eating in Town Center, they’re going to be taking the Metro to work every day and not clogging my streets, and hopefully, at one point, somebody’s going to be coming and buying my house for a lot more money because it’s only three blocks away from his office,” Moore said. “So, I think it’s exactly the right thing to do.”

Choice’s headquarters will support retail and restaurants in Town Center, Gottfried said.

“But it doesn’t matter that our taxes come from our right pocket as a subsidy or our left pocket as an incentive,” he said. “It’s still our money. And that is the real issue about Choice Hotels, that $1.7 million of our tax dollars was spent without a public hearing.”

Francis said that businesses “don’t make [relocation] decisions based on taxpayer dollars. They make that decision based on the features and amenities of the community.”

The city could offer company employees training by partnering with Montgomery College, said Francis, the former dean of the college’s Workforce Development Program.

“There’s a lot of things that we can offer here in Rockville other locations cannot offer,” he said. “We shouldn’t be giving away taxpayer dollars to try to buy corporations."

Hall said he agreed with Newton and Pierzchala about why the negotiations had to be done behind closed doors.

“Apart from the process issues, Choice Hotels was a great get for Rockville,” Hall said.

The headquarters “was a lot better than some of the things that could have been there,” he said.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here