"... What we have learned ... about your site selection process – some of it came from a Parks employee who was on your site selection committee. And he reported that he did not have the opportunity to talk about the concerns of the Planning Board as the property owner during the site selection. And a vote was taken, and there was no recording that he didn't support it, so that ... sounded like that his participation was minimized... He did not feel that he could ... fully express to the committee that this would not be a willing sell...It's something illuminating to me, ... that you have never done this before, that you are not accustomed to reaching out and taking another agency's land. So I can understand that perhaps you didn't think through all those ramifications. But we also are not accustomed to finding out, indirectly, that another agency is planning to take a park and turn it into something else. So you can imagine that that was alarming. ...... Our ... duty as the planning and parks commission is really to safeguard park property. We spent the County's money on land for parks, we spent money developing parks, and it has always been the intent that they would always be parks. So, it is a very different concept for us, to imagine that there would be a government agency that felt that they could say we're going to turn your park into something else."
- from comments by Ms. Françoise Carrier, Planning Board Chair, at the June 30th joint meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Education and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
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